Against tribalism

We are going to be hearing a lot about tribalism in the coming years. That's mostly because so many Americans now see solutions to their angst in joining identity clubs. Pick something about your identity - it must make you feel anxious - then go ranting and throwing stuff and lighting things on fire when the world doesn't step aside for you and your special identity.

What's weird is that they often do this under a banner of unity, though the laser focus on what makes them different from everybody else ends up being divisive. That's also quite different from the message of say, Rosa Parks, or Jackie Robinson, whose points were that we aren't so different at all.

Also, it doesn't seem to be enough to just not care much about what makes people so different and special. We are meant to embrace it. We must, under the identity formula, confess profound love for the particular identity, and we should probably apologize in public for having an "unconscious bias" for so many years. That's true even when the identity in question just sucks. Being a criminal, for instance, which the State of California is endeavoring to make a legitimate identity choice.

No thanks.

It's amusing to me that college football teams - so long and so often derided by academics - are among the few fully integrated workings anywhere on contemporary college campuses. I suppose that's because football teams are bound together by common goals, like winning. They are still meritocratic too, which is refreshing. Imagine if we were forced to play the third string quarterback only because all these years we've been nurturing an unconscious bias against bad quarterbacks.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, other students are being relentlessly hammered by monkish academics that encourage - even insist - on parsing every conceivable difference between human beings to prove one thesis or another about how very, very, different we all are.

That's tribalism, and it helps explain the proliferation of new cultural afflictions and affiliations no one ever even heard of ten years ago. Some folks believe that is progress, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt it.

Tribalism is really more about a kind of bottomless narcissism, so that anything or anyone who chafes at worshipping on the altar of the ego and the id must be boycotted or banned. Which is a mindset that ultimately just keeps banning or boycotting everything that causes personal discomfort.

Which is interesting because, seen in that context, the hard right and the hard left would seem to have more in common than they think.

I prefer a good team to all of that. Good teams unite people from all different backgrounds and experience and ability. Even a third-string quarterback, who never plays but always practices, gets credit when the team wins. Maybe America needs an old football coach instead of the endless parade of critics and nitwits who spend all day, every day, looking for ways to make the team doubt itself.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia are real things and they exist, but at this point in American history they are more like the measles. Measles has damaged and killed a lot of people, and we have that disease mostly on the ropes - except for a few dumb holdouts that keep inviting it back into our lives by refusing to get their children, or even themselves, inoculated.

What's probably more important to focus on, going forward, is what J.D. Vance wrote about in his excellent book, "Hillbilly Elegy."

"To me," Vance writes, "the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society's less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass...Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass."

This column certainly has biases, but so far as I know they are all fully conscious. One of those biases is against people who live in the lap of American luxury but seem to think it the very worst country on earth, which should be destroyed and rebuilt in the vision of racist, sexist, and economic ghouls like Marx and Engels.

Another bias is against those folks who think that having a lot of money makes them virtuous. The pontifications of political and celebrity narcissists at both the Franklin and McCain memorials is a fine illustration.

Maybe bias is too strong a word. Maybe I should say, "I am insufficiently persuaded that America is rotten and must be replaced by a socialist paradise." Or, "I am insufficiently persuaded that having a lot of money has made you a good person."

At any rate, I'm going to resist the popular tendency to embrace tribal leanings in our culture. I just can't see it producing many true heroes like Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, or Jackie Robinson. Those men - and there were lots of women too - were great because they managed, against heavy odds, to represent the very best of American optimism and promise. They overcame the very worst kinds of historical American tribalism to demonstrate that we aren't so very different after all. They united us, then and now, because they were bigger than stubborn insistence on their mere identity.

Which is still the point, right?