Let's Stop Talking About "Tribal" Feelings Unless We're Talking About Tribes
Why I was wrong to use the word as a catchall for togetherness and loyalty
Talking has always been the simplest, easiest and most common way people to mark the boundaries of their indifference. What you say, and what you write, reveals whom you care about, and whom you don't.
Here's a crudely obvious (but true!) example: Many years ago at a major newspaper, I had a part-time gig as a copy editor on the City Desk. One night there I received a reporter's story to edit, about people who practice voodoo. Vodoo, (like its relatives vodoun, vodú, vodum and others) is a religion that evolved in the Americas from West African traditions, brought from their homelands by enslaved people. I didn't know a lot about it (I'd read a couple of books, and worked with a Haitian scholar years earlier on a manuscript about practitioners). But I knew it's a rich tradition followed by millions of people from Africa to Brazil to New Orleans.
So I thought it was a problem that the article, as written, described voodoo as a "devil cult."
It took some persuading, but I managed to get that phrase removed, in favor of something more generically respectful. And so I earned my pay for the night, because I saved the newspaper from conspicuously showing indifference to one of the city's faiths, and the feelings of those who cherish it.
That's an especially glaring example, but all speech and writing are full of such cues. Cult or religion? Language or dialect? Trove of gold, sacred to the gods, or lump of ore? You can choose to view a valued object or person "from the inside," as it is seen by those who venerate it; you can choose to see it as nothing, a mere collection of atoms. Or you can choose to sound respectful but distant, uninformed but willing to take the word of the adherents, at least for now. For example, you can describe the founders of the United States as "inspired men raised up by the Lord for a special purpose"; or as fundamentally immoral slave-owners; or as "a group of predominantly wealthy plantation owners and businessmen [who] united 13 disparate colonies, fought for independence from Britain and penned a series of influential governing documents that steer the country to this day."
Take your pick. The words you choose convey whether you care, don't care, or are neutral towards your subject — and towards those who value it. And this is true not just of times when you explain that you don't care; you also send the signal when you explain what you do care about. Almost as soon as Ukraine was invaded, for instance, we had media people explaining that the resultant suffering wasn't the usual stuff that prosperous middle-class white people shrug at. Because these were the sort of people "we" care about, because as one correspondent put it, "look like any European family that you'd live next door to."
This is the lens through which I view many arguments about supposed "political correctness" and speech policing. Sure, it's a problem in 2022 that people fear to say things they believe are true, reasonable and civil in tone. But when bullies enforce new norms too harshly, the problem is the bullies — not the norms. I don't think a University of Southern California professor ought to be suspended and investigated for saying a Chinese word that coincidentally sounds like the n-word. But the excessiveness of the sanction does not mean it was wrong of the university to express its care for the feelings and experiences of African-American students.
Official America — the people who run institutions, governments, education, the media — decided recently to let many more identities invoke our supposedly universal respect for differences. It's easy to understate how big a change this is. When I was a child I was taught, and learned from example, that decent people didn't disparage Jews or Christians or (white) veterans. Many other types of person — women, Muslims, Spanish-speaking immigrants, Native Americans, gay people, Asian immigrants, and trans people, to name a few — were fodder for comedy, Halloween costumes and other indicators that you don't care what someone who holds that identity might think about your funny, funny joke. In 2022, in the culture of official America, all those people are as entitled to consideration as a rabbi was when I was 12. (And, unsurprisingly, the reaction against this imperative to care has not been limited to the newly-respected groups. The culture of "we don't want to care about them" has helped to foster a level of anti-Semitism in word and deed that I could not have imagined when I was a kid.)
What does it mean, though, to show that one is not indifferent to people who value a certain identity? It's not just about eschewing insults (that's stupid easy). It's about subtler forms of apathy in speech.
Which brings me to an example of indifference to others, of which I have been guilty.
It is the use of the words "tribe" and "tribal" to connote some sort of primitive mental state, into which Americans (supposedly once good-humored, dispassionate small-town meeting-attending salt-of- the-earth commonsensical lovable Joes and Janes) have now descended. This is the rhetoric of, "once we had political differences and debate. But nowadays, Jeez, we're so tribal."
A quarter of a century ago I started to work on a book about identity — especially intense identity, which gives rise to what Virginia Woolf described as "that absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse.” I wanted to write about the common ground in our perceptions of membership in races, nations, religions, cultures, social classes, sports fandoms and a zillion other groupings.
That such common ground exists in the human psyche was, I thought, well established when I was writing in the early aughts and is even better established now. The point of my book is that any trait at all can serve as the basis for fellow-feeling — or alienation.
Since I wanted to describe a feeling of alikeness, mutual understanding and fellow-feeling — but not those that belong to any one category (like nation or religion or race) I settled on a word I thought connoted, in a general way, the state of mind I was writing about. That feeling Woolf described, that feeling of wanting "our side" to show up well, and our ways to be valued — I could summon up that idea by invoking what a large number of my American and British readers thought when they heard the word "tribe."
What I did not consider, though, was the difference between this vague American trope and what tribe means to people who actually belong to real tribes — people for whom "tribe" can be at least as rich a mental experience as is country or religion for the supposedly typical American I imagined I was writing for. Some conversations with people who live in tribes, and think in tribes, showed me how impoverished is the image of "tribal" as vague and simple. Their sense of "tribe" was to the anemic white-American notion what a Stradivarius is to a kazoo.
To describe them otherwise is, as many have pointed out, the inheritance of colonial ideology. That's the one that said we have civilized institutions where decisions are made justly (hail, mother of parliaments), and we have serious moral identities (we Christians try to do good, we French believe in liberté, egalité, fraternité). But the people we've conquered are ruled by their belonging to a tribe.
I didn't mean to summon up a colonial world view in my readers. I thought I was just using a common writerly trick for introducing readers to an unfamiliar idea — which is to analogize it to a familiar one. But I didn't reflect on why tribal had come to stand for a thoughtless, uncomplicated relationship to identity. Using the words tribe and tribal when they're just second-hand notions that you've constructed from stereotypes is a reflection of the writer and the readers' indifference to the souls of actual tribal people.
This sort of indifference to others does not just deny them their voice. It also, of course, perpetuates the stereotype that is invoked. Every time someone says that now instead of good ol' politics we have Red and Blue partisans acting "tribal," it implicitly endorses the notion of tribal as simpler.
As has been cogently explained, in passing, in a new book by the culture and media scholar J. Jesse Ramirez. I say "in passing" because the book is actually about masculinity, neoliberalism, gaming and other issues. But Ramirez is on to the problem with the way Americans use "tribal" to describe feelings of non-tribal people. And in explaining he briefly mentions an article I wrote for National Geographic in 2018. In fact, he places me in a train of dumb journalists who drove this notion of "tribal," which he, quoting a student, calls stupid.
It is stupid, for reasons described above. I know better now. I regret the indifference I showed to actual tribal people by using that term in the way I used it.
But I can't cop to all that Ramirez accuses me of. He doesn't just say I glibly misused "tribe" and "tribal" as metaphors for states of mind that are no more or less tribal than they are national or ethnic. He also says that I used "tribal" to mean violent, brutish and hostile.
That's a bridge too far. And, to be honest, it's a little exasperating to read that I claim people are naturally doomed to hate and fear "others." I wrote a whole book against that idea. What people are prone to do is sense who feels like "us" and who feels like "them" in any given situation. But situations change, and so do perceptions of Us and Them.
After all, identity isn't a bomb shelter you climb into and lock. It's an activity you do, within your own mind and in conversation with other people. It's not fixed forever (people's notions of identity change over time) and the identity that feels important to you at noon can recede at 3 p.m. (being a Boomer, warm and comfortable among fellow oldies, can turn to a sharp and disputatious feeling in an argument with a bunch of Millennials).
It's also true, of course, that overwhelming obedience to the claims of an identity is a pathological condition that can strike anyone. Using the word "tribal" to describe such obedience is a way of suggesting that people who invoke membership in tribes as part of their identity activities are more primitive than people who invoke political parties, religion, nation, class, culture or whatever. That was not right. But that error is not the same as a claim that "tribal" feeling is only about hostility.
Magazine articles aren't as nuanced as books. Still, the Nat Geo piece that Ramirez cites doesn't say people divide inevitably and naturally into violent warring groups. Because perceptions of identity shift around, I wrote, people can find themselves in murderous conflicts with those who used to be their neighbors and friends. But then I invoked the way our perceptions of identity shift, and added, "our capacity to change our perceptions also offers some hope, because it permits people to shift in the direction of more inclusion, more justice, more peace." I wrote that people are "identity crazed." I did not write that being "identity crazed" inevitably leads to bloodshed.
The larger point here, though, is this: Changing one's language to make it less indifferent is not a matter of "don't say that word!" It requires subtler and deeper thought.