Communication achievement unlocked! My essential point being that ‘tribal’ goes deeper than the usual associations. In a sense, I was talking as much about bad v good tribes as anything else, but still IMO an important distinction. Babies, bath water….
You brought in the freaks (said as lovingly as possible), which opens up the topic of voluntary / association tribes; I believe it detracts from the points you were making - and I confess, I only addressed a relatively small part of your comment (just…that time of night, y’know?), and I’d like get back to it this afternoon, if I can.
Most of our ‘modern’ examples of tribalism & tribal societies are extremely westernized; the whole overview is often one of “these primitives”, and we tend to view indigenous populations as both tribal and inferior (at least ‘culturally’), as atavistic and out of step with ‘civilization’. I’ve been given the opportunity to experience a great deal of both the good and bad of tribal & semi-tribal realities, in both first-& third-world ‘field context’, and I’ve had a lot of years to think about the matter. This is my motivation for these remarks.
Always good talking with you
Your last paragraph really rings with me. I was struggling with the idea yesterday but it never came into proper focus.
I was reviewing some of the things I knew from childhood that didn’t age well. Like,
- there are humans, then beneath are the animals
- tribes are primitive bands who failed or chose not to advance, which is a consequence of their clownish religions
- residual Aryan certainty of being the ordained warriors and caretakers of man
-man! Women should be (long list of oppressions)
- I remember being maybe nine and being appalled by the fact of racism: the skin color kind around me, and the other, famously committed by race-cousins in Europe coupla decades prior. Bsck then that was as fresh as 9/11 and the Sandbox are to is here now.
It was my first aware experience that our society is perhaps not the model of civilization EVERY media source suggested so easily that it became Common Knowledge. It was by consensus beyond need for review and confidently used as axiom on every discussion of “whither forward”.
Okay, focusing. I sat in my nice clean suburban clothes in our nice clean backyard and wondering why the obvious evil was being tolerated. (When I read in a text designed for American grade-schoolers, the thought being “okay let’s see how the parvenus teach their kids, all raw potential but can’t pray cuz God listens in the original German” that South Africa had a persistent problem with racism. I made the natural assumption since the black/white ratio was five or six to one - that whites were the underclass.
Imagine my shock when I found out that was wrong.) It was the datum thst finally broke open the cotton-candy swirl of Fisher-Price dog whistles that I had been uncritically consuming.
Before that correction, (I’d already derived that race/religion discrimination was bullshit all the way down) I had a moment of awful doubt never focused but left a shadow - the question “are we in good society propagating any other big bigotries?” I could not find one. I was not yet aware that homosexuality even existed. Husband wife family house was my whole reality, with occasional angry mobs on TV who must have gotten that way because they did nor make their bed, wash hehind the ears or eat their cucumber salad (repressed trauma shiver).
By college, it was clear to me that othersexuals were The New N*.
What I did not know was that I had decades left of the Tootsie Pop of my mother’s smooth campaign to program me against the gay, before I came around to the center of the thing .
In retrospect, my big miss was underestimating institutional misogyny. My early adolescence was the heyday of the Equal Rights Amendment, which I could not imagine failing to pass. Combined with the visible phalanx of little cues that said women’s lib was here, most notably the combo of my first armpit hair and beholding the glory that is “braless tube top”, I figured “job done, women are people now”.
Fact is that women in business stll routinely draw less pay than men in the same specific position. That is a leading indicator among msny.
Then a classmate had a joke about feminists: “first they burn their bras and then they want support!”
Slowly, over decades, two bad realizations took shape.
1) I was wrong about women actually being treated equally. My dad alway treated mama as a full partner, so I considered “All in the Family” to be funny as an aberration and not a massive reality. Little did I know yet that my fellow white upperclass males generally did not do it like that. More injury was done when at nineteen the pentecostals got ahold of this unarmored atheist. I’ve mostly recovered, but the experience has shown me that they are working hard and ceaselessly at remodeling our nation into their unforgiving vision of the kingdom of God, and woe be unto the dissenters against the will of Jesus.
I am very afraid of the dominionists and their Medieval attitudes towardsex snd gender.
Had chance not taken me on the $20 tour of the basement of militant evangelism, I would be unaware of the threat. But I am, and when the GOP went Falwell, that was it for this well-bred young Republican. Today I think keeping church and state separate is under threat. If that firewall is breached, the Republic is gone, and we will perhaps follow the arc of Rome but globally. Life in the 26th century might be not much different than in the 6th.
2) why it was funny. As a kid, I loved ethnic jokes. I imagined them to be a wedge into the cracks of bigotry.
In another fitful process requiring decades, this idea died the death of ten thousand mouse bites. What I now believe, the thing to which I cannot find honest counterdata, that the joke was funny because it resonated against a deep pampered residue of my own bigotry. “Shit. I am a misogynist.” I did not arrive at the conclusion unassisted. I had to be wrestled to the mat by somebody who mercilessly laid out where I was replacing fact with sentiment. Even so, I refused to submit. Now in the quiet desert I have time to lick at the bitter fact and look for ways to break down my malignsnt thought pattens. It is slow, but it is happening. And for the first time in my life I am finding parts of hard work long deferred to be … interesting, providing a bit of forward impetus.
Bottom line.
When I hear a supposed Christian tell a bigoted joke, what I reflexively feel is fear.
.
