We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Many socio-political forces today are about the return to tribal identity. Tribes are isolated from the Other and easily coerced through emotional appeals to identity rather than universal logic. This has picked up methinks because information and people are increasingly ignoring the borders and authority defined by the state. So the thugs among us look to draw new boundaries based on race, gender, language etc. The new tribes destined to wage continuous and pointless war.
– the pseudonymous Chip drops an absolute blinder of a comment on Samizdata. There is a reason this comment is also categorised under ‘globalization’.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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No. Tribalism is freedom as long as there is no coercion. The last word is the most important in everything.
Coercive “universal logic” is no freedom either. NO is the word of freedom.
Spoken like someone with no understanding what is being analysed. Tribal identity politics is not about which social clubs you are at liberty to join.
When were human affairs ever conducted using ‘universal logic’, whatever that is?
So two commenters opposed to the idea of that objective reality might be better than emotion and group designation I see.
Universal logic as opposed to hyphenated logic. Science as opposed to socialist science. Truth as opposed to feminist truth. Reality as opposed to the Dreamtime.
New boundaries based on race, gender, language “etc”… this is a comment by someone who is ahistorical and thinks evolution started yesterday.
And.
What kind of boubdaries are based on “etc”?
Really? I think this is someone who is actually paying attention. Feminism. Sexism. Class Warfare. Multiculturalism. Cisgenderism. Ablism. etc. etc. etc. The attempts to create new identities by which people can be controlled goes on and on. These are all attempts to roll back the evolving global stateless cosmopolitanism so feared by collectivists of both left and right.
“Spoken like someone with no understanding what is being analysed. Tribal identity politics is not about which social clubs you are at liberty to join.”
If you have terms that change their meaning depending what/how is being analyzed then it is not unequivocal. A language, thinking, with that nature could evolve to something like 1984.
An equivocal term like “objective reality” that must be said appears straight up from a Neo-Marxist narrative can only be sustained with very strong support in mass media, that doesn’t exist. “Reality” is the only term that is needed. It is or it isn’t.
Who is John Galt? Was he cosmopolitan or anti cosmopolitan?
But beside the strong term/narrative discordances, the emphasis is wrong IMO also. It should be in coercive nature of whatever the subject we are talking about.
For example BBC only exists because of violence that the State makes in its behalf.
Anyone to stop people learning what they want to and make to learning what they do not want always has objective in politics. Always. People learn English and some do not like this at all because suddenly ideas come in from different places without filter of government and school. Soon government does not know what you might know, and worries you might not care what they want you to know.
Universal logic in politics is for totalitarians. Logically anyone who disagrees with them must be wrong, probably evil and therefore deserving of censure, punishment, psychiatric confinement or even death.
No fucking idea and I so don’t care. After Fountainhead I lost any urge to read more Randian fiction.
Context mate, context. It has a huge impact on what the language means. If you cannot figure out what is being discussed here, go back and ponder the context.
It is about that, you just seem to have not figured that out because you demand different language. I am happy to debate Randians on the basis of their usage when they have defined a given argument as that is just good manners (take the word ‘altruism’ for example, which means something different to the way most of the rest of the world uses it).
But I refuse to do so when I or someone else who is not a Randian (or Socialist or whatever) is making an argument, as it would just be bad manners on their part to expect it.
So I am perfectly happy with ‘objective reality’ as a term. Likewise I understood perfectly what Chip meant by ‘universal logic’. I would venture he means actual logic and not something else claiming to be logic (and Jane Simons seems to have grokked that just fine too). It is a bit like objecting to someone saying I speak “British English”. Well I could say “No, I simply speak English, what with me being from and living in England”. But in reality ‘British English’… like ‘Objective Reality’ and ‘Universal Logic’… are actually quite useful notions.
New boundaries based on race, gender, language “etc”… this is a comment by someone who is ahistorical and thinks evolution started yesterday.
These may not have started yesterday, but left to their own devices people of all stripes will naturally mingle, trade and breed with each other. The OP describes the mechanism by which the state (deliberately or otherwise) attempts to stop this from happening.
Agreed because it makes it clearer what you don’t mean. It removes wiggle room. Many times I’ve said “but the reality is…” only to have someone reply w. words to the effect “well that’s your reality, not mine”, as if there is no such thing as “objective” anything.
There’s a ‘should be’, and a ‘what is’ in there. The ‘should be’ is that every person is free to choose their alliances and their allegiances rationally. The cosmopolitan ideal that Perry speaks of.
The ‘what is’ is that most people don’t do so, they use irrational means, and end up not just damaging themselves, but those around them as well. Unfortunately, this describes the majority of humanity.
To the categories of race, gender, and language, I would add three more key dividers (uniters?) – religion, wealth, and ideology.
I think ideology alone will ensure that the world never merges into a single stateless entity. Can we rather the anti-capitalists isolate themselves from the rest of us and never bother us again?
Who gets to decide how universal logic works?
People at the Guardian and the BBC might insist that PC rules on race, sex, language etc are entirely logical and should be universally applied.
In fact they already do that!
We’d end up with several competeing versions of universal logic and be back where we started, arguing with each other about who is right and who is wrong.
Just like people always have done.
“Tribes are isolated from the Other and easily coerced through emotional appeals to identity rather than universal logic.”
The implication here is that this is some evil scheme being foisted on us rubes by race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson or statists such as the Trilateral Commission and various other One-Worlders. And perhaps this is true, to some extent. But it overlooks the fact that as a species we are inherently tribal in orientation to begin with. It certainly doesn’t take much to bring out that fundamental aspect of human nature. So I don’t think it makes any more sense to vilify those who take advantage of that characteristic than it does to criticize those of us who celebrate the essentially human Invisible Hand and the economic superiority of free markets.
Humans congregate with those who are like us, and are suspicious and, ultimately, fearful of those who are different. That’s who we are, and if that’s ever going to change it will require a fundamental alteration in basic human nature. Appealing to “universal logic” won’t do it.
In a very different context Fred Reed recently wrote:
I think he’s right. Fighting against human nature is a losing proposition. It makes far more sense to accept what we are, and go from there. And that means recognizing that most people vastly prefer associating with their own kind. I don’t see why that is necessarily a bad thing.
That is a bit like saying “who gets to decide trigonometry?” I really do not think that is what Chip was saying at all.
No, not “to some extent”. To a huge and pervasive extent. Every single country with enforced anti-assimilation laws that prevent free association (which is to say free disassociation) and which demand ‘multiculturalism’ are doing that not “to some extent” but in spades.
I see zero evidence for that. Tribalism is adaptive behaviour rather than a fundamental aspect of human nature. Under many circumstances tribalism makes perfect sense, but as things change, it makes less sense. And as a result, less people are tribal than before.
But actually that seems utterly beside the point anyway: this is not about the fact many people want to be around other people like themselves. It is about attempts by collectivists to use identity for political purposes. In the case relevant here it is by forcing people to learn languages of very questionable utility that have lost their ‘market share’. But the same can be said for the endless drivel that comes out of universities these days pertaining to gender, race and ability. Those are the ‘new tribes’ being created to fight the conflicts that benefit only the instigators.
Tribalism may be “adaptive” rather than inherent, but if so it has been a survival adaptation for such a long part of human evolution that at this point I don’t see any meaningful difference between the two. Maybe our species will eventually outgrow it, but that will take a very long time. And until then, tribalism remains a fundamental element of human psychology, and neither wishing nor appeals to logic will make it go away.
Don’t get me wrong, Perry, I’m not arguing in favor of mandatory language instruction (which is what that comment was originally in reference to); far from it. People should be entirely free to disassociate themselves from others, for whatever reason they choose. Forced assimilation (whether by language instruction, racial integration, or multiculturalism in all its forms) is antithetical to that. But as I read it that wasn’t Chip’s point. He was (and you are) objecting to “attempts by collectivists to use identity for political purposes.” I don’t fault people (either collectivists or any others) for using identity for their own objectives; that’s like faulting a retailer for making use of his customers’ desire for a bargain to achieve his own economic gain. We take people as they are and act accordingly in furtherance of our own ends. I see nothing wrong with that. You may object to those ends, and in the case of collectivists I would agree with you. But I have no issue with this particular tactic.
It is like comparing fish with barbed wire. As Hayek pointed out, extended societies have largely replaced pre-extended societies (and almost entirely so in the more prosperous parts of the world). When the advantage of an adaptation go away, the fact it worked for the previous hundred thousand years does not imply it will take thousands of years to largely vanish.
Given the large non-tribal populations in the world today, I think you are several centuries behind the curve here.
Certain Germans in 1930’s and 40’s. I assume you fault them for their use of identity politics, yes?
Where?
Much of the First World, even if not so much in your bit, I must admit 😉 . That is why the frantic creation of new identities are being peddled.
Why the grocer’s apostrophe in “1930’s” and “40’s”? It’s “1930s” and “’40s” surely.
LOL Perry, it should have been obvious that my question did not include my neck of the sands 🙂 I was and still am asking about the West: where? Not in the media and the academia, but where in the West do you see large non-tribal populations? Because I still see tribes everywhere in the West. And yes, new identities are in fact being frantically created, but they are not being created to fill a vacuum – there is none I can see, they are being created to replace the existing ones.
If I want a editor Nick I will ask for one but in the meantime, get stuffed.
Blame it on the Web. Connectivity is eroding national allegiance, replacing it with alternative attractors. Individuals are attracted by issues, movements and labels for many reasons, some of which doubtless have to do with our nature as intelligent apes++. If tribalism is in our genes to some extent, it manifests as an amplification of attraction, based on affiliation. None of this is rocket science, but pointing it out is important to those of us engaged in attempting to sway the affiliations of those around us.
Huh? Coercive teaching of dying languages pre-dates the web. Ditto manufactured identities like radical feminism, assorted sexual identities, class consciousness and the whole raft of attempts to create more grievance identities to push collectivist political agendas
Agreed. The connectivity has amplified the effect significantly.
“But it overlooks the fact that as a species we are inherently tribal in orientation to begin with. It certainly doesn’t take much to bring out that fundamental aspect of human nature.”
And I agree with all of this. Modern society has seen much transcendence of old unthinking hatreds. Today I can share an interest in Mars colonization with a guy from Bangalore and get along with him easier than the neighbor I’ve had for decades.
But this sucks for the demagogues because you can’t heard a “tribe” of Mars fanboys from 30 different countries. You need a seething mass acting on simple identifiers like race and gender.
So – even as they pretend to to be intellectuals – they’re really just stoking primitive impulses in themselves and others.
It’s really transparent. How is the War on Women any different from declaring war on Eurasia or Oceania?
It’s not. It’s just the age-old primitive nonsense getting new traction.
True but it has enormously amplified the forces of global cosmopolitanism as well.
Like any tool, the Web is amoral. It offers marvelous opportunities for good or ill. We need to be aware of the ways in which it can amplify the bad processes, as well as the good.
Given the tendency of collectivist ideology to produce outcomes diametrically opposed to their stated intentions, one might consider some intriguing results from the desperate appeal to “identity politics”.
What might happen, let’s say, if the identity group that invented modern society, and colonized most of the world at one time or another, gets imbued with “tribal identity”, and decides it’s time to put things right.
I read somewhere recently that the 21st century would be one of Christian revival, for example, not some other doctrine trying to act tough.
Such a result would be very much in fitting with collectivism’s getting things it does ass-backwards, and might lead to some extraordinary developments in social and other arrangements.
Interesting times, indeed.
Alisa:
I think your perspective might prove the point, in a way. Half a century ago, in the west, it was considered a sign that you were an educated and enlightened person if you understood the importance of trying to rise above our tribal instincts, and that this was the condition all people should strive for. Be a society of law and principle, not a society of personal or familial connections. It’s true that it was never the reality, but it was once the aspiration. That has now been dashed because the institutions that housed that aspiration now house completely contrary aspirations.
I’ll have to think about that, Tedd.
I was hoping Chip would come back with something more definitive.
What seems implied is that there is “logic” to a “universal” outlook for individual “identity” (membership) as opposed to the constraints of tribal memberships conferring identity (or at least the sense of “identity”).
That very “universality” concept is observable as Islam which is based upon the continuity of family, clan and tribe social organization that provides “identity” for its members. Still, as an ideology it allows (within bounds ) a form of individual identity with Allah (or at least so it seems it may). Still, it is a form of universality as was Christianity that was the cohesive force in the formation of European civilization – that became Western.
We may very well be looking at losses of cohesion, if not fragmentation, of Western Civilization. As the sense of cohesion fades, individuals seem inclined to seek commonalities that reinforce their perceptions that existence has meaning.
There are, of course, those who would, and do, say there is no “meaning.” But, that’s another issue and does not seem to influence many.
As our civilization began to lose its cohesion and entered into the age of conflict we have been in for a century now, the allure of universality has again arisen. Nationalism is losing (may have lost) its function for patriotism to supply mass combatants as the means for conflicts are returning to specialization (with high costs)and techniques.
In reaction, the emotional reaching for commonalities to replace nationalisms, produces more fragmentation of groupings, even in what have been “national” societies. That may be the least detrimental of the ongoing developments.
Tedd, I presume that you did not mean it as a dichotomy, but I would argue that those same institutions you mentioned did, if not originally, then later on as an extension.
Going back to and reiterating Laird’s original point, and Perry’s objection notwithstanding, we are innately wired to be attracted and feel more secure with those who are most like ourselves. This does not necessarily mean that we cannot rise above our tribal affinity and act purely on principles that are universally applicable. It just means that most of us most of the time prefer to associate with those most like us.
In our world as it currently is, with the internet and cheap flights and all that, tribes may no longer be based on geographical locations, ethnicity or race (although they still are, more often than some of us would like to think, including in the West). But we still do form and join tribes, all the time – only this time they may be based on shared interests, world views, politics and religion.
So going back to the quote in the post above, it’s not that those socio-political forces are trying to return us to the idea of tribal identity, as we never really left it behind in the first place. What they are doing instead and have been doing since time immemorial, is to entice or force us into tribes of their choosing rather than that of our own, whether real or made-up. There really is nothing new about any of this.
Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon:
There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them..declares the individual sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated to and sacrificed to the community….Humbugs and charlatans have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible
Identity politics attempts to corale the individual. The very characteristic eg sexuality, religious background, gender that was previously “oppressed” becomes defining: the ideological left does not permit ambiguity, choice or privacy to remain undefined.
Alisa:
Perhaps we’re having a violet agreement. I’m not trying to contradict anything Laird or you said. Perhaps a concrete example will explain what I mean better.
If it were not possible to overcome the limitations of human nature then the free market could not work — as many have argued it can’t. It takes the conscious application of abstract principles (property, liberty, equality under the law) and a deliberate legal framework to make a free market. In that way, as Smith described, human nature can be exploited (rather than contradicted) to produce a superior outcome and a morally superior society. Likewise, the human instinct for tribalism can only be countered by the conscious application of abstract principles and a deliberate legal framework. Both such developments are fragile precisely because they partly contradict human nature. But that is also why they are valuable.
Support for free markets has never been particularly strong in the west, but support for other universal principles was at one time at least recognized as a superior point of view. That peaked some decades ago and is now in decline.
Also, what Ljh said.
I know, Tedd – only the first para of my comment was addressing your point directly, the rest was just me generally thinking aloud at anyone who would listen… 🙂