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

I'm In Ur Private Plane Surfing Ur Kite

I haven't had occasion to post any Cute Obama Pictures for some time, but I imagine we'll be seeing plenty more now that he's handed repressive surveillance, privatizing Social Security, and drone killings along to Donald Trump.  The AV Club fawns.

Where will Obama’s sick adventures take him next? Skydiving? Getting an ankle tattoo of a turtle? Paintball at his cousin’s property up by the reservoir? Edibles? It’s hard to say, but his future looks so sick, he’s going to have to wear rainbow-gradient Oakley shades. 

One commenter gushed, "I would give my life for Mr. President Obama if he parachuted into N. Korea and personally executed Kim Jong-Un."  But Kim Jong-Un is already cool.

Who Controls the Present Controls the Past

I hear that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a best-seller again.  That's always a good thing, and if people are reading it with an agenda, that's nothing new. (If they're reading it. Buying a book, as I well know, is not the same as reading it.)  Nor is a surge in its sales new, as the NPR story I just linked indicates.  It happened, for example, right after the election of Ronald Reagan, and "Another time sales of the novel spiked was in 2013, after revelations by whistle-blower Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. surveillance operations. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the state keeps constant watch on its citizens to spot potential 'thought-crimes' or rebellion."

I was pleasantly surprised by this remark:

Richard Keeble, chairman of The Orwell Society and editor of the book of scholarship, Orwell Today, said Orwell would also have critiqued other aspects of Obama’s presidency. “In terms of double-think”–a term defined in the novel as the ability to hold two pieces of contradictory information at one time–“let’s think back to a so-called Nobel peace prize winner who waged war for most years of his presidency,” Keeble said.

This time the new popularity of the book is inspired by the presidency of Donald Trump, of course.  And that involves a good deal of doublethink and memory control on the part of many of Trump's Democratic critics, who must be sure to forget anything negative about Obama or Hillary Clinton.  Luckily, they have plenty of practice, forgetting or ignoring inconvenient facts.  Mention any of the less inspiring aspects of Barack Obama's record, no matter how well-documented, and they'll denounce you for making up stuff in the pay of the Republicans.  I'm quite impressed by their ability to block out Obama's support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, even when I or some other thought-criminal brings it to their attention.  I've sometimes mistaken this, along with their transitory pretense of concern for Syrian children, for a poor memory; but no, it's a strong, controlled memory that won't admit inconvenient facts in the first place.  Like Trump's base, they live in a hermetically sealed alternate reality, just a different one.

So I threw together a little post on Facebook:

"Wait a minute - Oceania hasn't always been at war with Eurasia! We were at war with Eastasia just yesterday!"

"Stop dwelling on the dead past! We need to focus on the future! You just want Eurasia to win!"

I was trying to decide whether to change the last sentence to "You're just trying to normalize Eurasia!" when my post got a couple of likes from liberal Facebook friends, both of whom misunderstood it.  One regularly posts awful political doggerel; I've never actually met him, and I'm thinking of unfriending him.  His comment was a link to his latest product, denouncing the "Trumpies."  So he missed the point.  The other I've known for more than thirty years, since he was a student at IU; he worked for the Clinton campaign last year, and assiduously passed along its talking points in response to criticism of Clinton on Facebook.  His comment: "And the Victory Tobacco ration will be raised from five units to two units! Another triumph on our behalf by Big Brother!"  Pretty clearly he missed the point too, but then he's an Inner Party member with a well-controlled memory.  (He was one of those who missed the point of a satirical Onion article about voting from last year, seemingly taking it at face value -- and he's not that stupid, at least ordinarily.)

If you want a picture of the future, though ...

"Edgy."  Isn't that the cutest thing?  Just a few months ago my liberal Democrat friends were assuring me that she had no interest in politics, she'd only been dragged into the campaign by her mom.  Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980; you do the math.

Picking the Brains of History: Ruth Moore's A Fair Wind Home

As someone -- Rousseau, isn't it? -- says, it's a funny world.  Just when it gets to the state where it seems as if the river were the only way out, some little thing will go and happen, and you are immediately convinced that whatever [is,] is right, and everything happens for the best in this best of all possible universes.*

"And then," as Dorothy Parker continued after listing various theatrical atrocities of 1921, "just when you are wondering if death by gas is really as painless as they say it is," you pick up another of Ruth Moore's novels, A Fair Wind Home (Morrow, 1953), and "you instantly feel that we are undoubtedly put here for a purpose, after all, and there is a very good chance of there being a hereafter."

What turned Parker's mood around was The Robbery a one-act play by Clare Kummer; for me it was starting to read A Fair Wind Home. Almost immediately a wave of relaxation swept over me as I returned to Ruth Moore's world.  This one is a departure from the novels I've read by her: it's an historical novel, set in the mid-1700s between the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution.  She warns the reader in a brief introductory note that

an historian might find that liberties have been taken, and that little attempt has been made to reproduce accessories of the period.  Those who wish battles and massacres may imagine them as taking place when and where they did; but there were times when people worked and built, and this is the story of three men of peace who lived in one of those piping times.

This stretches things just a bit, to my mind: there's a marvelous sequence about a third of the way through in which a rigidly honest woman tracks down a pirate to return money her son had stolen from him, and there's a small battle at its climax, which mostly takes place in the novel's peripheral vision.  But it's there.  I was afraid for a moment that Moore was going to write a much more violent book than any I'd read by her before, but she handled this element well: enough to be disturbing without letting it take over the story altogether, and with some sharp comedy thrown in.  The book would make a great PBS miniseries up to that point at least (I'm only about halfway through right now).  As usual, I love Moore's writing, her evocation of place, and her characters.  I've been needing the feeling of home, seen lovingly but critically, that she provides.

Looking for biographical information on Moore today, I noticed again that she hated the word "regionalist" when it was applied to her.  I understand why she felt that way -- "regionalist" was commonly used to diminish and dismiss the value of work by the authors it was applied to -- but I think it would be better to reclaim the word.  Not only have some major, critically respected writers been regionalists, but every writer worth his or her salt will have to do something with locations; it's just that setting a novel in New York City and its suburbs is not seen as "regionalism," just as the very English writer isn't seen as "ethnic."

Jennifer Craig Pixley, in a 1996 article on Moore I found online, wrote: "Moore does locate her novels and her poetry specifically on the coast of Maine. This is the geography of her childhood and the memorized terrain in which she is most at home. This is the location that she dreams of, even when she is not there, but her images of this locale are not sentimental."  True enough, though I don't think "not sentimental" goes far enough; as I've pointed out myself more than once, Moore was very critical of provincialism whether in her Maine fisherfolk or in the summer people who hired them as caretakers and housekeepers.  For me, as much as I enjoy her depiction of the Maine coast and its small towns, which don't seem all that different from other places anyway, it's her characters and their interactions that are memorable.  That someone like Ruth Moore lived, and wrote, as she did doesn't cause me to believe in the hereafter, but that there are human beings with sense out there in the world.

Dorothy Parker, "The Primrose Pathology," Ainslee's, May 1921.  Reprinted in Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918-1923 (iUniverse, 2014).

Only Trying to Help!

One of my liberal Democratic acquaintances recently attacked people who criticized Cory Booker for voting against Bernie Sanders' amendment urging our government to allow Americans to import drugs from Canada and thus save money.  He was, as is his custom, inventing excuses out of thin air when he claimed that Booker had good, complex reasons for voting against the amendment.  If so, Booker didn't say what they were: he only offered the argument given by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

My acquaintance claimed that those who criticized Booker were "helping Trump."  That accusation is familiar enough from last year's electoral campaign, when anyone who criticized Hillary Clinton could expect to be accused by Clinton loyalists as helping Trump, wanting Trump to win, etc.  My acquaintance has had little to say, however, about the Democratic Senators, mostly liberals' darlings, who've voted for Trump's cabinet and other nominees.

So let's say it bluntly: Voting for Trump's nominees is helping Trump.  Making excuses for the Democratic hacks who vote for Trump's nominees is helping Trump.

So is this:

Sen. Blumenthal says Dems shouldn't obstruct Gorsuch confirmation:"We should not repeat the Republican wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right"

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) February 1, 2017

As Glenn Greenwald remarked, "If you wanted to parody Dem politicians, this is what you would have them say, but in this case it's real."  The best way to deal with abject stupidities like this, I believe, is to dismantle them.  So, first, it isn't wrong to obstruct a nominee who is unsuitable or unfit for the position -- all the more reason to obstruct them, I'd say.  Second, Blumenthal confuses rejection of an unfit nominee with the Republican obstruction of certain of Obama's policies and programs, which was based not on their merits but on simple racism and partisanship.  If Trump is as bad as Democrats say he is (and he is), however, then it would make sense to dig in their heels and block him as reflexively as the Republicans did Obama.  If they want to be rational, however, they should be more selective and make sure that Trump isn't, by accident, pushing a good policy; it could happen.  So either Blumenthal can't tell the difference between principled opposition and mindless obstructionism, or he wants the public to be confused about it; in either case, he's helping Trump.

I expect to see a good deal more of this sort of thing in the coming months and years.  Any effective Democratic opposition to Trump, will evoke the popular (and also elite) nostalgia I saw during the debt-ceiling wars for the days when Democrats and Republicans were bipartisan instead of bickering and fighting all the time, and worked together for the good of the nation.  It should go without saying that voting for Trump's incompetent or bigoted nominees, or supporting his harmful policies, does not constitute working for the good of the nation.  But the Democrats are probably going to revert to their customary stance of collaboration with Republican efforts to do harm to most Americans; you can see its gravitational pull affecting them already.

Lesser Evil, Be Thou My Good!

Some right-wing frother (the brother of a friendly co-worker, as it happens) has been posting anti-Muslim propaganda on Facebook in support of Trump's highly selective Muslim ban.  (If Muslims are really so uniformly violent, why is Trump willing to let in Saudi, UAE, Bahraini, Egyptian, etc. Muslims?)  Today he posted a video clip of Bill Maher denouncing the supposed cluelessness of liberals about "radical Islam."   I knew I had seen some objections by Maher to the ban, so I did a little digging and found this one to toss at him, with a reminder that Maher is also vocally anti-Christian.  But how funny:

Will those who called Hillary "lesser of 2 evils"admit how wrong u were? Muslim ban, Betsy DeVoss, Pruit, Perry in charge of nukes...please.

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) February 2, 2017

Is Maher really as stupid as this tweet makes him seem?  Well, yes, probably, but leave that aside for the moment.  To say that Clinton was the lesser of two evils means that she wouldn't have done as many bad things as Trump is doing.  It also means that the person calling her a lesser evil intended to vote for her, and probably did.  It's hard to know what Maher and liberals mean when they throw tantrums over the term, but it appears that they think it means "exactly the same" or "far worse", and that is not what "lesser evil" means.  Democratic loyalists will even use the lesser-evil claim to try to persuade reluctant voters, perhaps chiding them for demanding perfection from a candidate, until a voter actually says the word "lesser evil," and then they stamp their feet and cry "The Devil told you that!"

Maher isn't the brightest pencil in the box anyway, and it's mildly entertaining (though also thoroughly depressing) to watch both the far Right and the near Right citing his foolishness to support their views.

There Are Two Kinds of People, and I Don't Like Them

I haven't been able to find a source for this quotation, but I guess it doesn't really matter much.  Even taking it at face value, my first reaction was to ask the friend who'd shared it what should be done when "good men" shout "ugly words of hatred."  My friend is more restrained than many liberals, who've been raving for the past several months against their political opponents in terms that I find indistinguishable from the right-wing Republicans they hate.  It's not a totally new phenomenon, of course, but it has gotten noticeably worse since Hillary Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination.

I've been noticing Democratic loyalist/apologists already demanding that "we" (meaning other people, of course, not themselves) quit the blame game, stop dwelling on the dead past (i.e., a few months ago), and think about the future. While it is important to think about what we're going to do in the future, we can't do so wisely unless we have some grasp of what happened in the past. I'm not going to forget, however, that during the campaign, those same loyalist/apologists were screaming "Nader! Nader!"  Forgetting the past is for other people, not for them. And besides, I am watching the present and thinking about the future -- I'm watching the Democratic leadership lining up to collaborate with Trump.

Dividing humanity into "good men" and "evil men," sheep and goats, Us and Them, tribalists vs. non-tribalists, the Enlightened Few and the Superstitious Many, is a dishonest and harmful strategy, because it means that when those we've counted as "good" start doing evil things, many will refuse to criticize them.  They're One Of Us, after all, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt, pick our battles -- and besides, they are at least not One of Them.  This is why I'm skeptical about the authenticity of the King quotation above: most of the time he knew better than this.

This led me to ruminate more on a quotation I've discussed before, from the first-century philosopher Epictetus: "If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation."  As I wrote before, the person who 'provokes' (who, for the slave-born Epictetus, was probably his master, wielding the rod) is also complicit in the provocation. and his or her responsibility should not be erased. But I agree that one should calculate one's response, if only for prudential reasons.  Questioning the extent to which I myself am complicit in the provocation doesn't mean that I don't recognize that it was meant as such; what I have to do is think of ways to do something about the power that the other person has over me, how to undermine and if possible remove it.

Richard Seymour wrote a good piece discussing suggestions that the Trump gang

is playing us all for suckers. They expected these protests and the judicial opposition. They are testing the ground, seeking out their allies and smoking out enemies, exhausting public opposition, exaggerating their objectives in order to beat a safe retreat. We, pawns in their little game, are giving them what they want by demonstrating and raising as much vocal opposition as we can.

Which, when you think about it, is very close to the way that quotation from Epictetus is used:  It's useless to fight back against oppression or even to resist it, because then you're "complicit" with the oppressor.

Seymour continues that the argument

makes an assumption of omniscience. You may well claim that sizeable demonstrations and judicial and legislative opposition were a predictable response to hastily imposed executive orders, introduced without any consultation with state actors, and without even providing them with the information they needed to actually implement the policy effectively. However, no one anticipated that three to four million would protest during the inauguration weekend, nor that there would be protests (in many cases illegal) at airports all over the country. To have foreseen all this would indeed be to experience a kind of omniscience, accessing a total reading of all the tendencies, subjective and objective, unfolding at breakneck pace now, in a vast, intricate and unusually unpredictable social order.

Somewhat ironically, the suggestion (I'm not sure it amounts to a claim yet) that Trump and his minions not only anticipated but plotted the Resistance brings back memories of the fantasies of Obama's devotees that their hero was playing eleven-dimensional chess with the opposition, and that the sequestration was a rope-a-dope that would trap and deliver a final knockout punch to the stupid GOP.   One might also note that Clinton and her minions thought it would be a good idea to support Trump for the Republican nomination at first, because they thought he would be easier to beat than Cruz, Rubio, or Bush.  We all know how well that worked!

But this scenario is a lot older than that.  Think of Oedipus, of whom it was foretold that he would kill his father and marry his mother.  His father had him exposed to try to avoid this fate, but he was found by shepherds and adopted by another king and queen.  When he learned of the prophecy as an adult, Oedipus fled, only to kill a stranger at a crossroads (who turned out to be his natural father) and to marry an older queen (who turned out to be his birth mother).  You can run, but the gods will get you in the end no matter what.  Of course there are no gods, but people still try to cast powerful mortals in the same role, as omniscient plotters you can't outfox.  Democrats and Republicans alike live in this fantasy world, as you can see.  As Seymour noted in an earlier post, "There has been non-stop chaos in the American state since Trump took office. This is partly, but not primarily, a matter of incompetence. There is no doubt that these moves could have been prepared for a lot better by the incoming Trump team."  But they weren't prepared for them; the Trump team are not omniscient -- thank whatever gods may be, because otherwise there would be no hope.

I like the protests that followed Trump's executive order barring entry to the US by people from select majority-Muslim states, and I like them better because unlike the women's marches and other demonstrations that followed Trump's Electoral College victory, they have a focus and a goal.  The protests are not mere "virtue-signaling" as one blogger pundit sneered -- that would better describe the previous demonstrations. They are also not the whole story, as the ACLU and other organizations fight the order in the courts, and citizens pressure their representatives in Congress.  As scary as the Trump gang are, they aren't omnipotent any more than they're omniscient.  But we must also think about what we want to replace them with: more Democratic retreads will just mark time until the next Republican strongman comes along.