Eliminate the Fake Tribalism, Give Us the Real Tribalism

This comment was posted under Ian Welsh's latest post:

The trick is in being able to shift as much of the common culture away from tribal identity and towards what’s really going on, who the real enemies are. [Roy] Moore was a good poster child for the corrupt nastiness that appears to want to benefit white males, but really only benefits the top 1%.

It pretty well demonstrates the vacuity of the term "tribalism."  The commenter is perfectly happy to carve humanity into distinct groups (or tribes, as he's using the term); he just wants his tribe (which is not my tribe, thanks anyway) to oppose the real bad tribe as he sees it, the "real enemies."  Ironically, his position is the exact opposite of Welsh's in the post he's commenting on.  It's common for people to use comments sections to soapbox for their own positions, but I don't think this guy even realizes that he's disagreeing.

Scattering the Tribes

Tribalism is a natural human trait. But über-nationalism is at all-time high in the US across the partisan spectrum pic.twitter.com/WDOliRBbN1

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 8, 2017

I'm not sure if this is an improvement over Greenwald's normal use of "tribalism."  Probably it isn't, because he still is using the word to refer to something like "an unthinking, primal attachment to kin."*  It might be that he intends it sarcastically, to suggest to "über-nationalists" that they're not as evolved as they like to think they are, but if so, I suspect they'll miss the snark.  And though I like "über-nationalists," I suspect it gets its punch from the association with Germany and Nazis.  Greenwald also knows that xenophobia is not limited to Germany.  I've griped about this before, but it's still a problem.

What is a tribe, exactly?  Curtis Keim, whose fine book Mistaking Africa I've mentioned before, helpfully explains:

One anthropology textbook designed for college students has defined tribe as one of five major types of political organization: band, tribe, chiefdom, confederacy, and state.  A tribe, says the author, is "a political group that comprises several bands or lineage groups, each with similar language and lifestyle and each occupying a distinct territory ... Tribal groups contain from 100 to several thousand people."  Tribes consist of one or more subgroups that have integrating factors but are not centralized upon a single individual, as they are in a chiefdom [114].

Keim devotes a chapter to discussing what tribes are, and correcting the stereotypes many Americans have about them; anyone interested could do worse than to read Mistaking Africa.  Needless to say, Greenwald is not using "tribal" in anything like this technical sense; he can only mean to imply that people who exhibit unthinking loyalty to their nation or other community are acting like primitives, be those primitives African, Pacific Islander, pre-Columbian American, or Cro-Magnon.  He'd be properly contemptuous of anyone who used such stereotypes of actual tribal people, or who stereotyped non-white people generally in those terms, but he persists in using "tribal" as a pejorative that relies on racist stereotyping for whatever force it has.  This is another one of those cases where a trope backfires: using "tribal" to distinguish Us from Them, the civilized from the unevolved, is itself an example of "tribalism" as Greenwald uses the term.

And yet this time he concedes that tribalism, in the sense he uses the word, "is a natural human trait."  I think this is a bit disingenous.  I'd agree that dividing the world into Us and Them is probably natural to our species, but it also probably goes along with being a social species, as we are, so it's not limited to human beings.  Nor does this natural trait determine social organization: as Keim indicates, human beings "naturally" form a variety of social organizations, and our ability to form large complex ones indicates that we can transcend narrow parochialism, clannishness (another freighted word), clubbiness, when it suits us to do so.  Belonging to a social species doesn't automatically cause xenophobia; xenophilia, a fascination with the stranger or outsider, is equally part of our human heritage.  The boundaries of the group are only drawn sharply under certain circumstances.  Using "social" or "socialism" to refer to unthinking loyalty to one's own group doesn't carry negative connotations, though, so it can't be used in place of "tribal."

What substitute can I propose?  Well, "xenophobia" might work, but it lacks the vernacular punch of "tribal."  We need an adjectival form of Kurt Vonnegut's coinage "granfalloon," which is intended as a pejorative but has no historical baggage.  A granfalloon, as Vonnegut defined it, is "a proud and meaningless association of human beings," based on "some circumstance of little or no real significance."  Of course the question then arises of what circumstances are of real significance, and who gets to decide.  I find it intriguing that social scientists have found that people will invent commonalities for groups to which they've been randomly assigned.  (Also that people have used "granfalloon" in ways that have nothing to do with its original meaning, even seemingly as a positive term.)  This suggests to me that granfalloonery is, if not "natural" to human beings, at least a tendency that comes easily to us.  Is "human" a granfalloon, I wonder?

But whatever word we replace it with, and there are numerous possibilities, "tribal" needs to be retired as a putdown for those who take granfalloonery to what one perceives as harmful extremes.  I expect better from Glenn Greenwald, with whom I agree on most important matters.

* Curtis Keim, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind (3rd edition, Westview, 2014), p. 113

"Why Hell?": The Collected Wisdom of Jean-Luc Picard

I'm back in the US, trying to adjust again to a fourteen-hour time difference.  Which may be why memes like the above, posted on Facebook the other day, leave me feeling punch-drunk and combative.

My first reaction, predictably enough, was "What do you mean 'we', bald man?"  I didn't land on a goddamn comet, though I do find the achievement interesting and worthwhile.  Nor have I clicked through the many links to Kim Kardashian's nekkid picture that have been thrown my way, nor until the Picard meme erupted into my feed like an infected zit have I talked or written about it.  I could add that talking about one doesn't necessarily preclude talking about the other, which a lot of elitist-wannabes tend to forget.

I commented to that effect, and my Liberal Artist Friend replied:

Duncan, it has to do with the natural human tendency to identify with the group(s) one is part of (e.g., humans, Americans, educated people, Internet users). Or even a group one feels some connection to (e.g., scientists) – as with sports fans who refer to a team with the word "we," even though they aren't on the team.

To which I replied:

Yes, LAF, that is known as "tribalism." (All kinds of problems with that word, of course.)

Because I'm still getting my jet-lagged brain in gear, it didn't occur to me right away that LAF's comment had also, inadvertently, answered the Picard meme.  Talking about Kardashian's power glutes has to do with the natural human tendency to cluster together and gawk, especially when (supposedly) erotic stimuli are put on display. More people, evidently, are interested in a nekkid picture of Kim Kardashian than with some quite unsexy pictures of a piece of dirty rocky ice in space.  Like it or not, that's a normal human tendency. (The stereotypical male fascination with machinery, which leads little boys to gawk at construction sites and sometimes at pictures of a machine landing on a piece of dirty rocky ice in space, is also a normal human tendency, but not a sign of greater rationality than the mindless herd; it's just a compulsion found in a smaller mindless herd.)  It also explains why people vote Republican or Democratic despite the failure of either party to give them what they want or need: the natural human tendency to identify with the group(s) one is part of, or even feels some connection with. Hence the tendency of devotees to identify with Barack Obama (for example), when he definitely does not identify with them. Just about everything LAF (or I, to be fair) dislikes in humanity has to do with natural human tendencies.  Natural human tendencies are not necessarily benign.

It happened that the Onion A.V. Club posted a negative review of the latest Dumb and Dumber movie yesterday, and the comments there contained some interesting digressions.  Someone remarked that Jim Carrey had apparently recanted his earlier anti-vaccination views, which led to a thread on that subject.  One person wrote:

Insisting that you know better than doctors, when you have no medical training whatsoever - even though it's clear children are dying because of your advice - cannot be written off as her being tragically misinformed and uneducated.

Here we have an example of what might be called science tribalism.  I haven't looked into the anti-vaxxer controversies and don't much care about them.  What I want to address is the weird notion that doctors know best, especially when they are united in their stance.  It was doctors and biologists -- and politically Progressive doctors and biologists at that -- who pushed through the American eugenic laws that imposed involuntary sterilization on thousands of "defectives", laws which provided a starting point for Nazi Germany's eugenic laws.  These laws were upheld by an 8-1 majority of the US Supreme Court in 1927.  Although a few scientists criticized these laws on scientific grounds, they were outliers.  Most opposition came from churches and from social scientists, who were derided for their superstition and hostility to science and reason, and their disregard of the human suffering that results from unregulated human breeding.

I have my disagreements with Michael Berube, but his book Life As We Know It (Pantheon, 1996), about being the parent of a son with Down Syndrome, contains some useful information about what doctors know and what they don't.

Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet, it was a diagnosis.  It wasn't uttered by callow, ignorant persons fearful of "difference" and Central Asian eyes; it was pronounced by the best-trained medical practitioners in the world, who told families of kids with Down's that their children would never be able to walk, talk, dress themselves, or recognize their parents.  Best to have the child institutionalized and tell one's friends that the baby died at birth.  Only the most stubborn, intransigent, or inspired parents resisted such advice from their trusted experts.  Who could reasonably expect otherwise?  [27]

The Berubes were given a lot of bad medical advice when their son Jamie was born in 1991, but it helped that Janet Berube was a nurse.  "Most doctors are relieved that they can talk details with Janet, but a few can get weird" (36f).  Still,

At one point a staff nurse was sent in to check on our mental health, and she found us babbling about meiosis and monoploids, wondering anew that Jamie had "gotten" Down syndrome the second he became a zygote.  When the nurse inadvertently left behind her notes, Janet sneaked a peek:  "Parents seem to be intellectualizing."  "Well," Janet shrugged, "that seems accurate enough" (14).

Berube notes that

Sometimes these parents [who rejected the 'best' medical advice and refused to institutionalize their children] acted out of religious conviction, believing they should play the hand God dealt them, whatever His plan might be.  Sometimes they acted pragmatically: one family decided not to institutionalize their baby when one doctor informed them that, at a state hospital, "perhaps the care would be so minimal that he would not survive past the first year of life." That one piece of advice wound up offsetting the counsel of every other physician they heard from.  Another family drove across two Midwestern states, on the advice of doctors, to speak to the headmaster of the nearest institution.  The father told me the story some thirty years after it happened.  After hours on the road, they met the headmaster, who appeared to have stepped out of a famous Grant Wood painting.  But despite his dour appearance, he wound up being the first person who'd given them any hope for their child, advising them to keep the baby home at first and see whether they'd be interested in bringing him in anytime in the first year -- but there was no rush.  The parents thanked the headmaster, left the institution, and never made the return trip.  As the father put it, they had finally been given permission to try to love and care for their child themselves, and that turned out to be all they needed [27-8].

Parents aren't always right either, and I think it's fair to be skeptical about the motives of parents who supposedly decided not to warehouse their children because of religion.  I think they rationalized their decision by selecting a dogma that supported it.  But these stories -- and more; I recommend Life As We Know It to anyone who might be interested -- are a reminder that neither religion nor science can be a substitute for judgment.  Obedience to the best medical or scientific knowledge will produce bad, inhumane decisions as reliably as obedience to religious teaching.  And these parents' refusal to accept the best medical advice wasn't based on medical or scientific knowledge, though medicine eventually caught up with them; they refused on purely emotional grounds.  But then that medical advice wasn't rational either.

"Tribalism" and the End of the Year Blahs ...

... to be followed, I suspect, by New Year blahs in short order.  I don't entirely know why I've slowed down in this last week of the year, though it's partly because of the heavy snow we got on the day after Christmas, and refreshed on Saturday and today.  No matter; it will pass.

I see that of the three big projects I listed in my agenda for this year, I didn't get to even one.  That's not terrible, because two of them had been on the back burner for several years anyway.  Maybe this year.

But one thing I can do, and that's to post a small supplement to my post on my unease with the word "tribalism," as used by left and progressive bloggers.  After I wrote it, I came across a book called Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind by Curtis Keim, published by Westview Press in 1999.  It's a reasonably short and accessible account of the ways Americans, white and to a lesser extent black, invent an Africa they want to believe in, rather than the Africa that is there. There's an entire chapter devoted to the word and concept of "tribe," and it confirms my sense that "tribal" and "tribalism," as used by white progressives, have racist overtones.

Keim writes that words like "nation," "people," and "tribe"

began to diverge in meaning in the late eighteenth century.  Europeans, who increasingly thought of themselves as more advanced than other peoples, needed words to distinguish themselves from others.  The word people retained its general usage, but nations came to thought of as larger groupings with more complex social structures and technologies.  The word tribes was reserved for groups that were smaller and, supposedly, simpler and less evolved.  Our modern ideas about primitives and the Dark Continent emerged in the same era.  By the mid-nineteenth century, the word tribe had assumed a negative meaning that implied political organizations that were primordial, backward, irrational, and static.  A person didn't join a tribe; one was born into it.  People in civilized societies could actively select from among different, creative courses of action, but tribal people followed tribal customs without thinking.  It was indeed fortunate for tribes that they had such customs to guide their actions, because members were so limited intellectually.  Of course, "tribalism" was expected of such people.  In other words, to be tribal was to be genetically incapable of more advanced thought or political organizations.

In the twentieth century, the meaning of the word tribe, as it applied to Africa, developed in two directions.  The first, favored by white politicians and colonial administrators, was a variation of the nineteenth-century definition of tribes as having closed boundaries and unchanging customs.  This was administratively useful because it allowed colonialists to make sense of an create order out of the bewildering variety of African political organizations ...

The second direction in the development of the word tribe was favored by anthropologists.  In the 1920s, anthropologists began to live with Africans and to take their day-to-day lives more seriously.  Their experiences revealed that the nineteen-century definition of tribe was deeply flawed.  They found that tribal peoples were neither unthinking nor less evolved than Westerners.  And they learned that tribes were constantly changing and adapting, just as were their own societies.  Anthropologists have sometimes been called servants of colonialism, because they provided the information and categories necessary to organize African people.  Although this negative label has some validity, it is also true that anthropologists were among the first to recognize that African complexity was creative rather than irrational and chaotic [99-101].

This history explains why the use of "tribal" as a putdown bothers me: it draws on nineteenth-century racist notions of "natives" as less "evolved," less intelligent and rational, and unable to think for themselves, but also as a different kind ("race") of person.  It also implies that non-tribalists are more evolved, smarter, and bold independent thinkers, though the leftish writers who use "tribal" this way would be properly contemptuous of the Europeans who thought they were a better breed than the dusky-hued people they tried to subjugate.  (And these same leftish writers are anticolonialist and anti-imperialist to a man.)  But this only shrinks the circle of evolved, intelligent, independent thinkers; it doesn't abolish the circle altogether.  There's still a "tribe" of Real Smart People in there, smug in their disdain for the lesser tribes.

(There's another side to this: I've noticed some intelligent American Indian writers and scholars who seem to accept the notion of tribes as timeless, ahistorical, uniform, and unchanging in their customs because the Elders know best.  None of them, I think, would actually want to live in such a society, but it's a comforting fantasy.)

I admit that I've been susceptible to this same tendency, especially as a lonely young bookworm and sissy.  It was very comforting to think of myself as part of an elite corps of Homo Superior, just waiting for our moment to emerge from the shadows and manifest our glory  It's a tendency I've worked to get free of, though I don't think it's possible for a human being to be completely free of it.  We're a social species, and there will always be Usses and Thems in our lives.  The question is how we treat the Thems.

I also admit that the use of "tribal" by these writers probably hurts no one.  It disturbs me mainly because it looks to me like a faultline in their politics and their thinking.  It disturbed me, but entertained me even more, when one of the writers in question and his Posse defended his use of "tribal" in the same way overt racists defend their practice: by accusing me of petty Political Correctness and Thought-Police tendencies, plus of course they couldn't have said anything racist, it's all in my imagination.  The writer's other line of defense was almost as funny: he cited the writer from whom he'd picked up this sense of "tribalism" as Authority.  (It's on the Internet, so it must be true!)  I consider this to be further evidence of how such groupthink erodes one's ability to think.

There are other words that could be used instead of "tribalism."  "Groupthink," for example.   Or more specific ones, like "party loyalty."  There are surely others  But it's so much easier to have a handy catchphrase, not too vulgar, for flogging one's ideological enemies.

No, You Hate America!

Back to "tribalism" for a moment.  I don't watch TV, so I haven't seen Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and had no idea what it was even about until it came up in a post at alicublog earlier this week.  As usual, Roy Edroso was discussing a rightblogger who'd been making a fool of himself online, "talking about [the] 'last remaining undecided voters in America,' and bases his characterization on the fact that a reality TV show about hillbillies beat out some reality TV shows about rich politicians making promises to America." Which, as Edroso noted, seems like a reasonable preference. The rightblogger called for an adjustment of Republican rhetoric to appeal to "the Honey Boo Boos": "the headlines need to be as unsubtle as possible, but still hewing to reality — reality through our lens."

Edroso continues:

I'll spare you: It mainly means recreating rightwing talking points like "OBAMA TEAM TWEETS COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA" in oversize red letters. "Even a Honey Boo Boo can get through those headlines," he says; "they’re short enough to survive the three-second attention span."

That someone actually thinks this about his fellow citizens doesn't surprise me, but I am a little surprised that he would say it out loud in a public forum. It suggests to me that Zombie is not actually concerned with influencing those voters. He's like a teenage boy who doesn't have a girlfriend and declares it's because girls prefer jerks, and so he'll be a jerk himself, and then they'll all come running. Having been a teenage boy myself, I recall that such a person is usually not seriously mapping out a seduction strategy, but looking for sympathy from like-minded loners.

Ah, the populist piety of campaign season!  Those whose memories are not properly disciplined may remember how, after the Kenyan usurper's false victory in 2008 and just before his 2010 comeuppance, rightbloggers high and low claimed that conservatives respect ordinary voters, while the liberals despise them.  I suspect this (false) claim had something to do with the fact that the Tea Party was flush with corporate money, and the Democrats were suffering from voter disenchantment, so the Republicans were feeling strong and of course they'd want to justify this by declaring their faith in the wisdom of We The People.  At the moment, however, the shoe is on the other foot: Romney and Ryan are flailing around helplessly, other Republican candidates are in trouble, Obama is confident, and many Democrats are already (and prematurely) proclaiming victory, so Roy can afford to be generous.

Of course I agree that it's not wise politically to say derogatory things about the voters, such as that we must not "underestimate how stupid the voting public is," that the wise elites "are always talking policy but the voters are always choosing on personality," that "the vast majority of voters don't vote on policy or logic or history but rather on tribal loyalties and misunderstood rumors."  However, this is how liberal Democrats talk sometimes.  While Roy Edroso was circumspect in this post, his commenters promptly began laying on the Hee-Haw jokes, obese hilljack couch potato jokes, Cracker jokes, White Trash jokes, etc.  One commenter wondered whether "the Honey Boo Boos (Does he mean the actual mo-rons of the show, or the ninnies who watch, btw? Pretty sure there's a difference.) are registered, let alone 'likely,' voters."  That was the rightblogger's point: that the show's subjects and audience were "undecided" and must be won over to the Romney-Ryan cause.  Evidently some Democrats feel that they'll never convince such people that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

The difference between this kind of "tribalism" and the kind that many leftbloggers decry is that it's not specifically racial, in the sense of dividing humanity up by skin color or language.  It is, however, related to scientific racism, which divides humanity according to class, years of schooling, IQ and other "cognitive" traits.  Class includes not only income and wealth but class markers, such as the kind of entertainment consumed, or one's religious affiliation: if you must be religious, then join a respectable denomination like the Episcopalians, or be a Reform Jew.  Though some crude forms of Social Darwinism are stereotypically associated with the Right, contempt for the poorer, fatter, and less schooled as a lesser breed is endemic among liberals, progressives and leftists.  Most of the right wingers I know are petit bourgeois, many are college graduates, and judging by their Facebook photos are pretty well-kept -- no doubt the result of many years' feeding from the public trough -- yet too many liberal Democrats stereotype the Right as obese trailer trash gorging themselves on Cheetos in front of the TV.  Not that they'd be justified even if it were true.

It's "National Don't Talk Like a Tribalist" Day

I've been wanting to write about this for some time, but wasn't sure I had properly sorted out my ideas.  This morning, though, the blogger VastLeft tweeted and posted on Facebook that today is "talk like a tribalist day! #everyday", and I realized I was just going to have to become the change I wanted to see in the world ... Seriously, I know from experience that I usually don't sort out my ideas on a subject until I write about it, so here goes.

I first noticed the words "tribal" and "tribalism" turning up as pejorative buzzwords in Glenn Greenwald's writing.  At first blush I thought the words were racist, since they imply that mindless solidarity is somehow a trait of 'primitive' foreigners; at second glance I still think they're racist.  Since modern Enlightenment white people tend to exhibit the same attitudes and behavior, it's factually incorrect to use a word that implies that they are signs of primitiveness.  By the same logic, breathing, eating, copulating, raising children, singing, dancing, and telling stories are primitive and "tribal," since tribal peoples do all these things and more.  It's also irrational, since it's really only a smear, like calling something "low-class."

More recently I noticed that VastLeft was using "tribal" more often; he's as apt to accuse Democrats as Republicans of tribalism as Greenwald is, but that's because they don't belong to either tribe.  So I was gratified at first when a commenter on Facebook wrote,

I know! Those Republicans are so tribalist. I'm glad that we liberals are so not tribalist, unlike those ugly stupid Republicans who wear tacky clothes!!!

To which I replied that we non-tribalists must stick together.  But as much fun as that was, it was too easy.  I might have been wrong to assume that the commenter meant to point out that using "tribalism" this way is a form of "tribalism" itself. VastLeft does, after all, attack liberals who are tribalist about the Right.  He is, however, ready to Other creationists, Bible-thumpers, and religious believers generally, on the tacit assumption that just being an atheist and rejecting religions is enough to make one a member of the Good Tribe of Enlightenment rationalists, critical thinkers, open-minded freethinkers, "Brights."  One of the reasons I've never put one of those red atheist A's on this blog is that it is, in this pejorative sense, a tribalist symbol.  I also stopped wearing lambdas and other gay-community symbols like the pink triangle a couple of decades ago, don't fly a rainbow flag or wear "freedom rings," though I didn't really think through my lack or loss of interest in them at the time.  I'm not saying these are bad things and no one should display them, understand, only that they don't interest me.  And yet I'm quite firm in identifying myself, labeling myself, as gay, as atheist, and so on -- as descriptive labels, not as badges of us/them.

Human beings are a social species.  We can't survive without the community and support of other human beings.  Community -- or tribalism, used as a descriptor rather than as a pejorative -- is a necessity for us.  Like any other natural phenomenon, it has its pitfalls: cliquishness, stereotyping, unthinking loyalty, xenophobia, ethnocentrism.  (I always think of Paul Goodman's remark, "I'm all for community because it is a human thing, only I always seem to be left out.")  And I'm enthusiastic about people joining together, working together, belong to communities of various kinds.  One reason I'm insistent about multiple identities is that I believe that remembering we all belong to more than one tribe can help avoid the kind of thinking and behavior that Greenwald and VastLeft want to stigmatize as "tribalism."

According to this blogger, the writer Sam Harris "thinks that even calling yourself 'atheist' is labeling yourself for theist's convenience and argues why have a name for what you DON'T believe in? You probably don't believe in astrology or ghosts either so do you need a special name for NOT believing in those things too?"  This doesn't keep Harris from Othering religous believers and other groups he thinks of as irrational, of course.  The reason to "have a name for what you DON'T believe in" seems obvious enough to me in this case, just because so many people believe in gods.  But I'm not wedded to the word "atheist."  I'm just as happy to say that I don't believe in gods, and I meet enough people, weirdly enough, who don't know what "atheist" means that I often have to explain it anyway.

On the other hand, I have enough differences with other atheists that I think it's important for me to insist that I am an atheist despite this, not out of "tribalism" but to stress that we are not a tribe, that there is no atheist creed, no loyalty oaths, and atheists (including me) are not exempt from my disagreement or criticism.  Atheism, like any other label, is vast, it contains multitudes.  You can't solve the difficulties this entails by drawing a line in the sand; you have to learn to manage the complexities.  (Sometimes I think of this as the difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism: Platonism postulates identities and ideal types, while Aristoteleanism enumerates variety and family resemblances.)

In the same way, I think it illustrates my point, and may be valuable, if I vote for Obama and criticize him relentlessly, because so many people think that a vote for a candidate entails slavish, uncritical devotion to him or her forever after.  Likewise, the anthropologist and Hindu monk Agehandanda Bharati used to say that one can be a believer and a sound scholar if one "radically criticize[s] the doctrine with which one identifies, pointing out its weaknesses, its foibles, and the clay feet of its founders and sustainers, at every step."* Knowing that accepting an identity doesn't exempt you from the obligation of thinking critically about it is, I think, one remedy for what Greenwald and VastLeft call "tribalism."  Using "tribalism" as a derisive label is no remedy at all -- it's part of the problem.

In honor of VastLeft's "talk like a tribalist day," I'm going to rename this blog for a few days. Arggghhhhh.

*Agehananda Bharati, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism, Ross-Erikson, 1976, page 68.  In the same book Bharati says in passing. "A primitive society, by anthropological criteria, is a small, band-like society structured entirely on kinship lines, which does not deploy fulltime specialists for anything" (142).  Two things about this: 1) it's not derogatory or racist to use the word "primitive" in this way, just as there is a definition of "tribal" that isn't derogatory or racist, but either word can be used to put down what one doesn't like in one's own allegedly "advanced" culture, just as "childish" can be; 2) by Bharati's definition there are still "primitive" aspects of modern Western society, and these are not necessarily bad: friendship, kinship, taking care of others as amateurs rather than as specialists, without expecting cash payment for doing so.  In their use of "tribal" as a pejorative, however, Greenwald and VastLeft are doing something different, like Christians dismissing all non-Yahwists as "pagans."

The Tribalism of Elite Democrats

[I apologize for posting this so late, but the issues I tried to address in it are still depressingly timely.  I considered simply ditching it, but then I realized that some posts I wanted to write assumed and referred to things I'd written here, so I'm just posting it even though I'm far from satisfied with it.  Today's unexpected -- by just about everybody, I think -- Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, for example, has spawned a deluge of Obamabot self-congratulation that adds weight to this post, as messed-up as it is.]

Speaking of practicality, there was a dust-up in the comments under a post at alicublog the other day.  (There are no permalinks to the more than 150 comments, so I'll just quote extensively.)

Roy Edroso gracelessly conceded defeat in the Walker recall, buying the corporate media's take on the whole affair.  Didn't even mention that the Wisconsin Senate is probably going to flip to Democratic control, preferring to go by the ancient liberal adage, "If life gives you lemons, flop down squalling because it's not candy."  (This also takes the form, "If President Obama doesn't give you the pony he promised you, blame the stupid voters.")

After awhile the alicublog regular aimai changed the subject (on page 5 of the comments):

I just had that morning meeting with Elizabeth Warren I mentioned a couple of posts ago. She is wonderful. You couldn't ask for someone who has a better grasp of the entire range of historical and economic factors that undirgirded American Success in the past (while acknowleding that many communities were left out of the American Dream) and also a better grasp of what she would do once in the Senate to fight for better policies.  

However, she radically underestimates how stupid the voting public is. One of the people in the room asked her how to talk to [the idiots] who think that we can't handle any social spending until we've cut the deficit? This is clearly an issue of persuasion and narrative about which she's spent a lot of time thinking. She launched into a, sadly, incomprehensible parable/discussion about three buckets of spending. We all got lost midway through. I'd been biting my tongue all the way along because who am I to interrupt a candidate during a stump speech to a group of moneyed supporters? But I basically interrupted and said "Uh...no.  You say "When your family is in financial difficulty you invest in the future. You pay on your mortgage. You pay on your kid's education.  You never take a look at your family's situation and say 'I know, lets starve the baby to death and cut grandma's meds" in order to pay the note on the car.'"  At the end of the meeting she actually thanked me and said "I'm going to use your line: would you rather feed your baby, or the banks?"

Had a long talk with some of the populi at the vid store afterwards. Guy said to me that he and his wife were definitely going to vote for Warren, because they are dems, but they don't like her personally because she comes across as such a "schoolteacher." After kicking the idea around a bit we came up with the following slogan for her "Send the Scary Teacher to Washington" and "Warren! Washington's Afraid of Her."  My point here, and I do have one, is that we are always talking policy but the voters are always choosing on personality.  

That closing sentence is remarkable, coming from someone who has repeatedly brushed aside policy in favor of personality where Obama is concerned.  Last year, for example, she wrote (via):

Whatever my feelings about Obama's centrism I've got to say that he and Michelle really adorn the White House. As a couple they are just...well...magnificent and the children are fucking adorable (same age as my two so I really feel for them). The huffpo lineup of former first ladies and their dresses at these state dinners was like the evolution of humanity from grotesquely old and billowy faux victoriana to blooming, statuesque, youth.

Perhaps "we" talk about policy, but "our" hearts (or other parts, lower down) still overrule mere principles in the end.  Ironically, though, aimai's advice to Warren struck me as sound enough.  Her story makes me suspect that Obama has a lot to answer for in not appointing Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Warren appears to be the kind of technocrat who can work very effectively as an appointee (which is probably why Obama didn't appoint her: effectiveness was what her opponents feared in her), but isn't really suited to pressing flesh and communicating with the public.

The policy / personality dichotomy is bogus, though, like so many dichotmies.  The lies that the Republicans and the Democrats grind out are usually a mixture of the two: Mitt Romney flipflops on every issue.  President Obama is destroying the economy.  Obama's 2008 victory was due mainly to personality and marketing, plus revulsion at the malfeasance of Bush-Cheney.  The voting public isn't stupid so much as ignorant, and as Josh Billings said, the trouble isn't that people are ignorant but that they know so much that isn't so -- and that's as true of elite Democrats as it is of lumpen Republicans.  It's part of the job of a professional to explain what he or she is doing in terms the client can understand.  (As Daniel Ellsberg once said, though, politicians are professional liars.  That has to be at least part of the problem.)   To jeer at the clients/voters because they don't understand when you speak to them in plain jargon is like the stereotypical American tourist, convinced that if she only speaks loudly and clearly enough, these dumb foreigners will admit they understand plain English after all.

It says something, I think, that so many smart Democrats threw tantrums over Scott Walker's victory in Wisconsin.  Yes, it gave the Republicans some propaganda, but that doesn't mean the Democrats have to fall for it.  Exit polls in Wisconsin show that voters weren't gulled by Walker's big spending: they were uncomfortable with the idea of the recall itself.  That's not stupid or ignorant, because if it had worked, Republicans would have adopted recalls as their newest political toy, and every Democratic politician who looked at all vulnerable would have had to fight off recalls funded by the Koch Brothers.  I think it's also significant that the yammerers ignored the likelihood that the Wisconsin State Senate is going to flip Democratic, which should have been good news for them. (The recount is in progress as I finally post this.)

Another lefty troublemaker in the thread remarked that calling the voters stupid is, if nothing else, bad strategy, which produced a shitstorm of abusive ad hominems and distortions from the party loyalists, including aimai.  That's only to be expected, and it's not my subject here.  On page 7 of the comments, aimai summed up:

I think the only thing remaining to be said is that idiots need good representation too. Voters have one thing to trade, in this democracy, for good government: their votes. But the vast majority of citizens don't vote, and the vast majority of voters don't vote on policy or logic or history but rather on tribal loyalties and misunderstood rumors.  It isn't their fault that both parties benefit from depressed turnout and low voter control over government positions. It isn't their fault that a corporate owned media controls information in such a way that it is nearly impossible to figure out who is doing what to whom in congress. My point to Warren is really to point out that the ins and outs of policy issues--who voted for what amendment--is not relevant to most voters. They can't figure it out. They don't know for sure what a Senator does or how Congress works.  And many of them, lets be honest, don't see why they should bother to find out.  She is pitching her argument towards people who know a lot but that is not the majority of voters. She is pitching her argument to the sensible "middle" who remember a better America and believe in a better America for all. But that is not the swing voter in MA. The swing voter is a resentful ex Republican who wants to spite everyone for the fact that the state is run just fine by Democrats and there is a black man in the white house.

"... the vast majority of voters don't vote on policy or logic or history but rather on tribal loyalties and misunderstood rumors."  Reading this, I find myself wondering briefly if perhaps aimai meant to include herself in that vast majority of tribal voters; but of course she doesn't, she's one of the wise few.  (She denies that she's an elitist, but it's hard to see what else she could be if she sees herself as one of a tiny minority of voters who find "the ins and outs of policy issues" relevant and have the smarts to "figure out who is doing what to whom in congress."  That's okay, I don't necessarily object to elitism; it's just that self-styled elites always seem to be inferior.)

"Voters have one thing to trade, in this democracy, for good government: their votes." That's the trouble, isn't it? A vote and a token will get you on the subway.  $250,000 and a vote, on the other hand, will get you regular golf dates with the President.  Of course citizens have more than their votes, even before they vote.  They can work for candidates they support; they can run for office themselves.  After the election, they can write to their government, they can call, they can organize protests.  That last, of course, doesn't go over well with governments, because it may bring actual pressure to bear on them.

aimai remarks on the deplorably low turnout of voters at election time.  She also knows that both parties like it that way, and probably knows (but doesn't say) that the last thing either party wants is a large infusion of new, previously unregistered and inactive voters into the pool, and both parties have worked actively to prevent this.  In light of this, it's really disingenuous to blame the voters, call them idiots, etc.  Even a 75 percent turnout of eligible voters for a national election would cause panic among our national elites.

Since I began working on this post, another thought has been nagging its way from the back of my mind.  Both parties are comfortably beholden to big corporate and financial money, and the (extreme) minority interests that money represents.  They have only the barest interest in the concerns or interests of the majority of Americans, except to get the legitimacy that comes from their votes, and increasing proportions of the public recognize this.  The legitimacy of any government (and I'm not talking here about a particular administration but about the institution itself) depends on its ability to persuade the public that it serves their interests.  I think the American government is losing its legitimacy rapidly.  One of the worst things about Obama is that he got a lot of people's hopes up, deliberately, and then crushed them.  Personality cults have always been part of American politics, but now they are all that national elections are about.  The best we can hope for is the emergence of a new third party that would really try to represent the interests of the mass of voters; the worst could be much worse.  But for the foreseeable future, it looks like we're in for more empty, incredibly expensive spectacles, like the one that is still four long months from its climax now.