The diagnosis is easy. America has divided into two hostile tribes, each willing to believe the most outlandish lies about the other, each keener on hunting heretics than on winning converts. But what is the prescription? Is the malady susceptible to treatment at all?
I have written many times about America’s retreat from the Enlightenment. The emphasis on individual freedom that created the United States has given way to the older, pre-agrarian imperative of my-tribe-good-your-tribe-bad. Writers and artists are canceled retrospectively for violating newly sacralized norms.
Public figures are forced to apologize for crimes committed by remote ancestors. University places are allocated on the basis of ancestry or physiognomy. Some disturbed youngsters, picking up the trends, are driven into tribal violence and are then selectively condemned — the people most outraged by jihadis, say, are rarely the same as the people most outraged by terrorists who attack mosques.
America, in short, is becoming less WEIRD — the acronym coined by the brilliant Harvard University academic Joseph Henrich to describe the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies that managed to transcend the hunter-gatherer ethic and invent the concept of the individual, free from tribe and caste. Henrich puts this extraordinary development, which we, naturally, take for granted, down to the Western church’s obsessive prohibition of cousin marriage, which broke down kin groups and forced people to relate one to another autonomously, relying on impartial laws rather than inherited obligations.
Glancing at the news in any given week, who can doubt that the U.S. is becoming less WEIRD even as it becomes weirder?
“You’ve got to be taught, to hate and fear / You’ve got to be taught from year to year…”
Rodgers and Hammerstein got it precisely the wrong way round. Tribalism comes naturally. We need to be taught not to blame people for what their families did, not to judge them by how they look, not to dismiss what they say if they are from outside our sect.
For decades, schools and colleges did this, thereby enabling an open society. Now, unforgivably, they are doing the opposite, teaching even very young children to see everything through the prism of imagined racial hierarchies.
Tribalism prevents us from seeing the flaws in our own side while making us exaggerate any lapses from the other. It is why, for example, liberals who privately loathe cancel culture feel they can’t speak out lest they confirm the conservative narrative. It is why conservatives who believe the last election was not stolen decline to speak out against those who claim it was.
It is why leftists tend to overlook physical attacks on pregnancy crisis centers, and rightists on abortion clinics. It is not that they approve of these things. It is that they simply don’t register seeing them.
Last week, tribalism drove Texas Republicans into booing and then censuring their senior senator, John Cornyn, a man who voted for former President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda 92.2% of the time and holds a rare A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, because he wanted a bipartisan agreement on guns. It was not the detail that bothered his inquisitors so much as the fact of working with the other side.
What can be done about this? As I write the solutions, I realize how hopeless they sound. We should inform ourselves about what people on the other side actually believe rather than relying on our allies’ accounts of what they are supposed to stand for. We should condemn bad behavior from our own side rather than “whatabouting,” deflecting, or denying it. We should force ourselves to read uncongenial news stories.
But we won’t. Even in a pre-internet age, we didn’t. Here is C.S. Lewis in one of his radio broadcasts during World War II:
That process is now so well advanced that it is hard to see us turning back. Once politics is defined by hating the other side, the hatred spreads until almost every neutral is thought to be on the other side. What a sad, bitter, destructive end we make for ourselves.
