Is Tribalism Bad?

Is Tribalism Bad? | National Review

(The article might be behind a paywall, so this post includes a bit longer excerpts than usual. Abigail Anthony makes good points here. She is mostly thinking in the political arena, but her points apply to religious “tribalism” as well.)

“Tribalism” is an increasingly popular word. In a heated panel discussion on a recent Piers Morgan Uncensored episode, Rikki Schlott said the following: “I hate this argument that because some people were tribal we should be tribal too. Shouldn’t we want to live in a society where we say tribalism is bad in general and negative in general, and so therefore we should be erring towards individualism and not fighting tribalism with more tribalism?”

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If “tribalism” means something like “group affiliation and internal group cohesion,” then I have difficulty seeing it as categorically wrong. Successful political movements need their members to have a consensus on what they believe, why they believe that and not an opposing view, and what outcomes they want to see based on their shared view. A familiar example is the pro-life movement. The March for Life attendees agree that human life begins at conception, human life has a moral value at conception, abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent child, and policies should seek to prevent abortion. These individuals, I think, would engage in a subtle version of “identity politics” by describing themselves as “pro-life” because they believe that such a label succinctly summarizes an important personal value that influences their worldview. Likewise, they may further participate in “identity politics” by refusing to vote for a politician who doesn’t embrace the “pro-life” label. By these standards, the pro-life movement — along with pretty much every other activist movement — is a tribe, and it engages in tribalism by opposing the pro-abortion crowd because of disagreement on significant moral questions whose answers have significant societal consequences. Of course, there’s also in-group policing: If you think abortion is fine up until the day of birth, then you won’t be a featured speaker at the March for Life, nor will you get a job at a pro-life organization.

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Ultimately, if a “tribe” can be any group with a shared set of commitments that regulates its membership and challenges another group with diametrically opposed commitments, then arguments that society needs to be “less tribal” are doomed to fail because there’s no even distribution of interests and values across society, and people form relationships on the basis of shared traits. If you are an “anti-tribalist” in favor of liberalism and individualism, then you have to reconcile your denunciation of social groups with the liberal principle of free association. Why can’t individuals assess the values and ideas held by themselves and others, then socially associate with respect to those shared values? An us-versus-them social landscape emerges for every possible topical issue in our free society because we occupy an idea-versus-idea environment. Rather than shriek about the human impulse to join a tribe, it’s more productive to explain which tribes are worthy of members — and doing so is necessarily a form of intertribal competition. Alternative strategies end up with the self-defeating claim: Join me in the fight against tribalism.