Tribalism in a World Dominated by America and English April 6, 2008
Posted by ymarsakar in War.trackback
Simon wrote a post concerning tribalism that I had to respond to.
The citizen is an altogether different animal from the member of a tribe. He lives by a diffeent set of rules. A set of rules the tribalist considers unmanly and without honor. The civilized man rates peace and prosperity higher than honor. Which is not the same as being without honor. A mistake tribalists have been making about the democratically civilized for a very long time. Because the civilized man will allow himself to be dishonored for the sake of peace the tribal man assumes that the civilized man is weak. In fact the civilized man can be more brutal than the tribalist when the civilized man goes into the honor mode. When in that mode it is not just tit for tat revenge he seeks, but the complete destruction of the disturbers of his peace.
I think a core difference is that Western civilization demands that you refuse to kill, even in self-defense or the defense of a loved one, when the tribes say that to be part of their society you “must kill”.
The indoctrination against using violence is so strong in decadent and civilized nations like the US that you often have people willing to be beat to death and never fight back because their experience in life has always been “obey the authorities or receive punishment”.
My post correlates those societal inhibitions in relation to self-defense and why people refuse to fight back when they are being attacked by anti-social people.
This is the challenge: how do we define membership in the tribe? and how strict are we in enforcing the requirements?
All of humanity is our tribe and we enforce that with nuclear fire and military strength. Enemies of humanity, humanity being our tribe, must be exterminated: Such folks as pirates and terrorists. Allies of humanity should be cultivated and integrated into the tribe.
That is the ideal. The civilization that we should be working towards but have not yet reached, not long by a shot.
In this sense, you combine classical liberal values of Greece and Aristotle with the Roman Republic system of phased in citizenship with America’s promotion of individual sovereignty and protection of liberties.
Tribalism creates eternal war, slavery, and suffering because resources are wasted fighting each other. There is no unity, no harmony, and thus no comprehension of the “Other”.
Tribalism developed because no one man or tribe was strong enough to say “here are the rules and we will enforce it”. The tribe is essentially the largest unit that can be governed in any one location, and for most of human history it was amazingly small (think family groups) until the advent of Republics and nations. So why would any individual respond with “okay, we will follow you rules and give up our ways of killing and murdering in return for security and civilized products” when the capacity for universal or even just large security guarantees were false promises? The tribe prefers strong leaders that demonstrate the ability to take charge and maintain order. Because that is what the tribe is for, to protect its members. And it only engages in clanwarfare because it can’t trust the other clans not to stab them in the back if they find it convenient. Under a strong leader that can unite the clans, they no longer have to worry about this because they have faith the leader will make any clan that steps out of bounds extinct. If you show that you are too weak in will to kill every man, woman, and child to maintain order in your lands, every tribal leader will rebel. For why should they cooperate when they have seen the fecklessness, incompetence, and spineless of the United States occupation forces? They get no security in return and they are asked to “give up everything they know” for democracy. That’s a nice bargain.
People want something in return. They don’t want to give you something for nothing.
Steven Pressfield’s article on this subject is very nice, given that he wrote classical historical works on Thermopylae and Alexander the Great.
This op-ed appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer under a different title. The paper called it, “Tribalism is the Real Enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
IT’S THE TRIBES, STUPID
Forget the Koran. Forget the ayatollahs and the imams. If we want to understand the enemy we’re fighting in Iraq, the magic word is tribe.
Islam is not our opponent in Baghdad or Fallouja. We delude ourselves if we believe the foe is a religion. The enemy is tribalism articulated in terms of religion.
For two years I’ve been researching a book about Alexander the Great’s counter-guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan, 330-327 B.C. What struck me most powerfully is that that war is a dead ringer for the ones we’re fighting today — even though Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic.
In other words, the clash of East and West is at bottom not about religion. It’s about two different ways of being in the world. Those ways haven’t changed in 2300 years. They are polar antagonists, incompatible and irreconcilable.
The West is modern and rational; its constituent unit is the nation. The East is ancient and visceral; its constituent unit is the tribe.
What is a tribe anyway?
The tribe is the most ancient form of social organization. It arose from the hunter-gatherer clans of pre-history. A tribe is small. It consists of personal, face-to-face relationships, often of blood. A tribe is cohesive. Its structure is hierarchical. It has a leader and a rigid set of norms and customs that defines each individual’s role. Like a hunting band, the tribe knows who’s the top dog and knows how to follow orders. What makes Islam so powerful in the world today is that its all-embracing discipline and order overlay the tribal mind-set so perfectly. Islam delivers the certainty and security that the tribe used to. It permits the tribal way to survive and thrive in a post-tribal and super-tribal world.
Am I knocking tribalism? Not at all. In many ways I think people are happier in a tribal universe. Consider the appeal of post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior or The Day After Tomorrow. Modern life is tough. Who can fault us if now and then we entertain the idea of going back to the simple life?
The people we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan live that life 24/7/365 and they’ve been living it for the past ten thousand years. They like it. It’s who they are. They’re not going to change.
How do you combat a tribal enemy?
Step one is to recognize that that enemy is tribal. We in the West may flatter ourselves that democracy is taking root in Iraq when we see news footage of blue-ink thumbs and beaming faces emerging from polls. What’s really happening has nothing to do with democracy. What’s happening is the tribal chief has passed the word and everybody is voting exactly as he told them to.
What is the nature of the tribe? What can sociology tell us about its attributes?
The tribe respects power.
Saddam Hussein understood this. So did Tito, Stalin, Hitler. So will the next strong man who ultimately stabilizes Iraq.
The tribe must have a chief. It demands a leader. With a top dog, every underdog knows his place. He feels secure. He can provide security for this family. The tribe needs a Tony Soprano. It needs a Godfather.
The U.S. blew it in Iraq the first week after occupying Baghdad. Capt. Nate Fick of the Recon Marines tells the story of that brief interlude when U.S. forces were still respected, just before the looting started. Capt. Fick went in that interval to the local headman in his area of responsibility in Baghdad; he asked what he needed. The chief replied, “Clean water, electricity, and as many statues of George W. Bush as you can give us.”
The tribe needs a boss. Alexander understood this. Unlike the U.S., the Macedonians knew how to conquer a country. When Alexander took Babylon in 333 B.C., he let the people know he was the man. They accepted this. They welcomed it. Life could go on.
When we Americans declared in essence to the Iraqis, “Here, folks, you’re free now; set up your own government,” they looked at us as if we were crazy. The tribal mind doesn’t want freedom; it wants security. Order. It wants a New Boss. The Iraqis lost all respect for us then. They saw us as naive, as fools. They saw that we could be beaten.
The tribe is a warrior; its foundation is warrior pride.
The heart of every tribal male is that of a warrior. Even the most wretched youth in a Palestinian refugee camp sees himself as a knight of Islam. The Pathan code of nangwali prescribes three virtues–nang, pride; badal, revenge; melmastia, hospitality. These guys are Apaches.
What the warrior craves before all else is respect. Respect from his own people, and, even more, from his enemy. When we of the West understand this, as Alexander did, we’ll have taken the first step toward solving the unsolvable.
The tribe places no value on freedom.
The tribe is the most primitive form of social organization. In the conditions under which the tribe evolved, survival was everything. Cohesion meant the difference between starving and eating. The tribe enforces conformity by every means possible–wives, mothers, and daughters add the whip hand to keep the warriors in line. Freedom is a luxury the tribe can’t afford. The tribesman’s priority is respect within the tribe, to belong, to be judged a man.
You can’t sell “freedom” to tribesmen any more than you can sell “democracy.” He doesn’t want it. It violates his code. It threatens everything he stands for.
The tribe is bound to the land.
I just read an article about Ariel Sharon (a tribal leader if there ever was one.) The interviewer was describing how, as Sharon crossed a certain stretch of Israeli real estate, he pointed out with great emotion the hills where the Biblical character Abigail lived out her story. In other words, to the tribesman the land isn’t for sale; it’s been rendered sacred by the sagas of ancestors. The tribe will paint the stones red with its own blood before letting itself be evicted from the land.
The tribe cannot be negotiated with.
Tribes deal in absolutes. Their standards of honor cannot be compromised. Crush the tribe in one century, it will rise again a thousand years from now. We’re seeing this now in a Middle East where the Crusades happened yesterday. When the tribe negotiates, it is always a sham — a stalling tactic meant to mitigate temporary weakness. Do we believe Iran is really “coming to the table?” As soon as the tribe regains power, it will abrogate every treaty and every pact.
The tribe has no honor except within its own sphere, deriving justice for its own people. Its code is Us versus Them. The outsider is a gentile, an infidel, a devil.
These are just a few of the characteristics of the tribal mind. Now: what to do about this?
How to deal with the tribal mind.
You can’t make deals with a tribal foe; they won’t be honored. You can’t buy them; they’ll take your money and despise you. The tribe can’t be reasoned with. Its mind is not rational, it’s instinctive. The tribe is not modern but primitive. The tribe thinks from the stem of its brain, not the cortex. Its code is of warrior pride, not of Enlightenment reason.
To deal successfully with the tribe, a negotiator of the West must first grant it its pride and honor. The tribe’s males must be addressed as warriors; its women must be treated with respect. The tribe must be left to its own land, to govern as it deems best.
If you want to get out of a tribal war, you must find a scenario by which the tribe can declare itself victorious. The tribal mind is canny; it knows when it’s whipped. But its warrior pride is so fierce, it cannot admit this. The tribe has to be allowed its face.
How Alexander got out of a quagmire.
It took Alexander three years, but he finally got a handle on the tribal mind. (Perhaps because so many of his own Macedonians were basically tribal.) Alexander produced peace by marrying the daughter of his most powerful enemy, the princess Roxane. The tribe understands such an act. This is respect. This is honor.
Alexander made the tribesmen his equals. He acknowledged their warrior honor. When he and his army marched out to their next conquest, Alexander took the bravest of his former enemies with him as his Companions. They rode at his side in stations of honor; they dined at his shoulder in the royal pavilion. (Of course he also beat the living hell out of the Afghans for three years prior, and when he took off he left a fifth of his army to garrison the place.)
Everything is there except the conclusion.
Neil Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” covers tribalism in terms of future society. Because of encryption technology, nation-states break down because they can’t collect taxes. In that vacuum, people bind themselves together based on shared culture (and therefore values) and form “tribes,” which ask loyalty of their members. The “New Victorians” demand taking vows and acting according to strict Victorian guidelines. Let me tell you, it was nice to see a character say, even in a novel, that some cultures are intrinsically better than others.
It’s a different definition of the word tribe; one with no stigma of primitivism attached to it. The article, though, makes certain points. What the tribes in the Middle East ( and the rest of our allies and enemies) need to see is the astonishing capability of U.S. forces and tactics. Turn Mecca and Medina and Qom into radioactive glass or summarily execute suspected al Qaeda members in front of cameras, in other words, and those tribesmen will see that the gloves are off. We don’t need to help them save face; we just need them to see what the inevitable result of resistance to us is.
Much of the often touted invincible terrorist “guerrilla fighter” freedom fighters and resistance fighters were seen to be slippery and unaccountable for their actions. The occupation forces must obey laws and Geneva Conventions and take care of the people and provide services and provide all that jazz. But when the insurgents start executing civilians, oh, then it’s different, then they are not supposed to be held accountable or they have no chain of command that can be held to account for the actions of fighters that wear no uniform and acknowledge no official hierarchy.
A foreign fighter comes in from Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, gets captured, but who do we punish? Syria? Some desk worker in the Syrian Baathist bureaucracy/ Should we go in, kidnap, and execute that person?
There’s no train of accountability, and even if there were, there were no precedents of law to use to seek extradition or punish or whatever.
The tribal dynamic, however, gives us a way to hold a known and transparent hierarchy to account for the actions of their members. If we cannot hold terrorists or foreign government officials accountable for the assassins that they send into Iraq, then perhaps we can hold the tribe of the assassin accountable. Since the tribe is based upon pride and open accounts of debt, vengeance, and restitution, we can target and launch punitive expeditions against the tribe and its leaders for the actions of its lower members.
This would make our response to global terrorism just as global in reach. However, it would not appeal to lawyers or those that are still invested in the nation-state paradigm of holding people to account. They hold people that have clear chains of command to account, like Bush and Rumsfield, but don’t bother with terrorists because their excuse is that terrorists are not officially supported by a President or foreign bureaucrat.
As much as tribalism is a worry and can exploit our disadvantages, it is also a soothing and reassuring fact of life that other human beings still have hierarchies that we can target and annihilate. They being our enemies, makes it very important to be able to use our conventional power in the way that it was intended for.
If people could not find those that were accountable, then conventional firepower is useless. Which was the state of the US concerning Al Qaeda for some time. People fixate on Osama because they see him as the top guy, the leader. And yet many people in Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia are just as responsible, including the tribes near the Afghan-Pakistan border that helped Bin Laden escape Afghanistan.
Punitive expeditions, the punishment of the tribe responsible for attacks against us, are as effective as they are frowned upon by lawyers and so called diplomats.
Holding the women and children of the tribe hostage is also a tactic recognized by our enemy tribes. Given the state of terrorism now a days, in which families are paid off to produce suicide bombers and little girls and boys are turned into living ticking bombs, it is quite a humane thing to do to take women and children out of that kind of climate.
Americans have been living under a unified law system and justice process for so long that they have forgotten what it was like in the real world. Assuming Americans ever knew what the real world was like.