The Coming Of Neo-Tribalism.

Of honour, gangsters, nomadic tribes and of course identity politics.

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve written extensively about the destructive effects of unchained Liberalism on western societies, and the resulting social breakdown. I’m not going to repeat myself much here, but rather try to address a consequential point: what I see as a disastrously misguided and ultimately futile attempt to fill the yawning void left by triumphant Liberalism with a form of ascriptive identity tribalism, why and how it began, and how it has gained pace in recent years. I’m going to draw here on anthropological studies, individual and group psychology, criminology, and even the work of a famous fourteenth century Arab historian and sociologist. But only in a non-threatening manner, and to the extent that they are useful.

Humans have to cooperate to survive. It may not seem that way these days, when you order everything by telephone and Internet, but of course if there were no-one to make and deliver your instant pizza, you wouldn’t eat. Do you know how to grow food, and could you even do so? Do you know how to make drinking water safe? Could you keep yourself warm, in the absence of electric power. (If you don’t know, you may be about to find out sooner than you think.) In effect, modern society relies on an almost infinite division of labour, such that a very small problem (say, petrol tanker drivers going on strike) can paralyse an entire economy. So we must cooperate to survive, as we always have.

But of course such economic links and cooperation are only part of the story. People traditionally lived in extended communities, and it’s been persuasively argued that the endurance of these communities, and their ability to learn and adapt, is what distinguishes human beings from other animals. The most basic unit is the family and kinship group (even when I was small, most extended families lived at the very least in the same town or city.) Originally, such communities were like micro-states: economically self-sufficient and capable of collective organisation and self-defence. Many of them (and we tend to forget this nowadays) lived very close to extinction: one bad rice-harvest in parts of Asia, and the village might starve. Cooperation was literally a matter of life and death.

Anthropologists studied tribal societies well into the twentieth century, and we have a good idea how they worked (and in some cases still do, with the Tuareg of the Sahel being a surviving example.) And their observations accord very well with the structures and behaviour described in the Mudaddimah, the great work of history and political and sociological theory by the fourteenth  century Arab intellectual Ibn Khaldûn, who, like most political writers worth reading, had practical, hands-on experience of what he described. And they also tally with what we can discern from epic literature such as the Iliad, Beowulf and the Norse Sagas.

The tribe is initially an extended kinship group; tracing its origin from one individual. The further back the tribe can trace its lineage, the larger the tribe and the stronger its position. As Ibn Khaldûn said (and modern anthropologists have found), in such a society the only people you can really count on in an emergency are those with whom you enjoy a sense of group solidarity (the Arabic Asabiyah) and in the first instance they are those who have blood ties (thus, incidentally, the importance of female chastity.) Yet these ties are not equally strong at all levels. The famous Beduin saying “myself against my brothers, myself and my brothers against my cousins, myself and my brothers and my cousins against the world” is often seen as an example of progressive solidarity, but of course the logic applies in reverse as well. I take the part of my brother against my cousin, my cousin against my second cousin, my relative five generations removed from the founder against my relative six generations removed, without any real choice, and unto the death if necessary. The answer to Carl Schmitt’s question: “who is my enemy?” is, potentially, anyone at any time.

Such a political system is essentially anarchic, and all that really holds an extended kinship group together is ties of blood and the impulsion towards survival against mutual enemies. There are no universal normative “laws” as we would understand them: murder or robbery of outsiders is honourable and praiseworthy. Tribes are rough democracies, where no-one really has the power to enforce obedience. There is often a venerated figure, usually the eldest male, whose job it is to try to find a consensus and avert dangerous conflict (this is the origin of the belief in “patriarchy”, by the way.) “Authority” in such contexts comes essentially from experience and knowledge: the man who has taken part in forty harvests, the woman who has had four children and helped bring dozens more into the world, are listened to and their advice followed. Often, elderly and respected women function as emissaries and negotiators to sort out personal and marital problems before they become a threat to the peace of the tribe (a practice you still find in pats of Asia.)

Such societies have co-existed with organised states over thousands of years, and the relationship has been conflictual; as it still is today in the Sahel, for example. The State is historically perceived as an instrument of oppression, taking resources and providing nothing in return. So stealing from the State, refusing to pay taxes and customs duties and attacking and killing its agents, is regarded as honourable behaviour. It’s unsurprising therefore, that organised crime in Europe today is very largely in the hands of immigrants from such societies (Kosovo, Chechnya …), who bring with them a heritage of distrust and enmity towards the state and its rules.

Eventually, some central power, usually a monarchy, was able to assert and enforce its control over these communities, especially those who lived in geographically accessible area. But that’s not to say that human beings immediately began to act as indistinguishable ciphers in the best Liberal fashion: far from it. Even today, and in spite of the best efforts of governments, people take pride in collective identities: in traditions, in local dialects and accents, in traditional beliefs and faiths, in history, in common origins and common culture. In addition, there developed voluntary forms of adhesion: to churches, trades unions, community associations, political parties, professional associations, even amateur football teams and leisure societies. From the identification with the city of one’s birth (think of Dante’s desperate longing to return to Florence) through loyalty to regions, to rulers and ultimately to ethnic groups and nation-states, people have always tried to find some group above and beyond themselves to identify with.

Liberalism has spent the last two hundred years trying to destroy all this, and now it has largely succeeded. Liberalism, we recall, is an ideology of radical individualism: it might be fairer to call it an ideology of self-interest, or even simply of selfishness. The individual is the measure of all things, and there is no higher value than individual freedom, especially in the economic sphere. But of course ultimately, your freedom can imply my lack of freedom, and the exercise of my rights often imposes obligations on you. Liberalism is essentially a zero-sum game, a competition to exert our freedom and impose obligations on others, with victory going to those with the most power and money. This was less of a problem so long as Liberalism remained the elite ideology it originally was, but any attempt to generalise it to society as a whole was bound to create problems. Hence the apparent paradox that Liberal societies allegedly devoted to personal freedom often have highly repressive laws. But the paradox is indeed only apparent: when Liberalism reaches its apogee, as at the moment, it turns into a war of all against all, and threatens a kind of Hobbesian anarchy, only regulated through the courts and the media. It’s unsurprising that some have claimed Hobbes as an early Liberal: liberal societies today are approaching his world of anarchy tempered by absolutism with unnerving speed. Yet in fact, the problem of unrestricted liberty was appreciated early on: by the Robespierre and his fellow Liberals of the French Revolution, for example, who introduced very strict laws about morality, and made the cult of the Supreme Being compulsory, to combat what they saw as a dangerous drift towards pure atheism.

I’m not going to spend any more time dissing Liberalism: it’s been done competently enough by writers from both the Left and the Right. I just want to discuss the damage that Liberalism has caused to the traditional intermediate structures of western societies, and that has provoked the disastrous attempts to make up for it through Identity Politics, or, as I would prefer to call it, the Politics of Grievance.

Some of these problems could legitimately be described as side-effects. The worship of property-ownership and the encouragement of speculation drove ordinary people out of cities, and scattered families around the country, to wherever they could afford to live. The financialisation of the economy destroyed entire industries, devastated entire communities, made health-care and education more difficult to obtain, and destroyed careers and the stability that went with them. The preference of governments for cars and motorways rather than public transport destroyed city centres, the abolition of barriers to movements of goods, capital and people produced a race to the bottom which has benefitted almost nobody. Yet, whilst people have got rich from these developments, and whilst there were certainly those who saw political profit in some of them, most ordinary Liberals who went along with them did so because of a naive belief in “freedom,” and in the ability of the market to sort everything out. Even now, some hold desperately to the belief that “flexibility” of some kind, or more education, or information technology, or artificial intelligence, or something, will put things right again.

But there are things also that have been deliberately willed by the Liberal heritage. Liberalism was impatient with the past, and wanted to sweep away traditions, superstitions, religion, history, even nations, and replace everything with rational, mathematical calculations of the common good. So instead of compassion we get Quality-adjusted Life Years, instead of education being a public good and a means to personal betterment, it is a cold investment intended to produce a revenue stream later. Instead of citizens, with rights and responsibilities, we have residents who might as well be customers, paying fees to governments and benefiting from services, like shareholders in a company.

Between the deliberately intended and the malignly inadvertent, most of the points through which individuals were previously able to situate themselves with respect to others simply disappeared. In Europe, every attempt has been made to suppress history, except insofar as it can be used to induce feelings of culpability and shame. In France, for example, too great an interest in the dramatic and popular side of history—battles, wars, revolutions, kings and famous leaders—is increasingly seen as showing support for the Extreme Right. The currently fashionable history textbook, entitled France in the World, only mentions French history insofar as it involves other nations, usually negatively. But the logical concomitant, a genuine sense of common European heritage and culture taught to all, is equally unacceptable, since it is seen as neocolonialist and “white”by Brussels. Through one of history’s more sardonic jokes, most recent immigrants to Europe come with a very strong sense of tradition, history, religion and culture, and where it conflicts with democratic values and, indeed Liberal ideas, it cannot be challenged because racism. It can only be a question of time, though, before European leaders finally realise that if you teach children to despise their country, its history and culture, correspondingly few will be prepared to die subsequently for your mistakes.

In previous generations, the family was the first mechanism through which children began to understand that they lived in a world which extended beyond their own Egos.The family provided good and bad role models, things to emulate and disagree with, patterns to follow or avoid, experience of life to be transmitted, and most crucially something to rebel against and reach a final settlement with, as part of the process of becoming an individual. Extended families provided good or bad examples of nurturing of the young and care of the old. Liberalism, with its belief that all relationships should ultimately be transactional, was never at ease with the extended family, and as early as Locke, sought to turn the family into nothing more than a set of near-kin contractual relationships. (English fiction from Austen to Galsworthy cannot be understood without appreciating the depth to which Liberalism had turned middle-class marriage into an affair of legal marriage contracts and succession struggles over inheritances.) Some Liberals in the French Revolution, taking their cue from Rousseau, wanted to free children from the shackles of their families altogether, and give them absolute rights “over their bodies”. (This led ultimately to the pressure for the decriminalisation of pedophilia in the 1970s; an idea which seems to be back on the agenda again.)

In effect, the Liberal doctrine of Rights, the nearest thing that Liberalism has to a religion, is a Frankenstein’s monster: once you start awarding rights, there is no logical place to stop. Recently we have seen rights notionally awarded to animals, to nature, to the Earth, even to medical procedures like abortion. But it is clear that if you apply the discourse and assumptions of Rights to human relationships without qualification,  you produce nothing but a series of alienated individuals going around with shopping lists looking for other individuals who tick all, or most of the boxes. The concept of mutuality in any kind of relationship, of asking not just What do I want? but also What do I have to give? has perished with the triumph of Liberalism. The increasing disintegration of traditional families, partly as a by-product of economic stresses, partly as a willed social outcome, has left today’s young people with a frequently negative experience of actual personal relationships, and much reduced opportunities to observe others, to see and try to understand what works and what doesn’t, what is good behaviour and what is to be avoided. It’s not unusual these days to meet people in their twenties and thirties who don’t have “families” in the traditional sense of the term. They may or may not be in touch with both their biological parents, who may or may not be in touch with each other, and their personal life will be strewn with sensitivities, and subjects and people to avoid.

Now it may be argued that this is just unfortunate, that it is a stage in human social evolution, and that in principle Stuff Should be Done by Someone such that children nonetheless grow up with a sense of personal belonging. This is from the same school of thought that closed mental hospitals on the basis that Someone would look after the inmates In the Community, and that schools were repressive institutions that could be closed and replaced by Something that Someone would provide. But what it has done is to throw young people back on their own devices, in everything from the  most mundane issues to the most existential. Do you ask your uncle, an automobile fanatic with whom you were always close, his advice about buying a car, knowing that your mother’s current partner detests him? Perhaps not, so you turn to the Internet: but who do you believe there? (By another piece of malevolent historical irony, Asian children succeed disproportionately well in life because of the persistence of strong family bonds and norms. Doubtless, their societies will ultimately develop away from that.)

For good or ill, children of previous generations grew up to understand that they were part of a greater whole, which they could accept or reject, in whole or in part, but never ignore. (James Joyce, I would argue, actually lived in Dublin all his life.) The splintering and alienating effects of Liberalism were constrained, successively and to a degree in in parallel, by inherited social conservatism among ordinary people, by the stern and sober duty-oriented Protestant culture of much of the West, by the burgeoning Socialist and trades union movements with their culture of collective responsibility and, not least, by elite fears of the electoral success of Left-wing and Communist political parties. But with the conversion of the last parties of the Left into boutique power machines in the 1990s, and the end of organised trades unionism, the way was at last clear for Liberalism to rampage through the economy and through society.

Here, it is important to recall that Liberalism was always concerned with power. It began, after all, as a middle-class ideology intended to seize and hold power from the aristocracy. Although is is notionally about “freedom” it has, as I have suggested, produced a free-for-all society in which the amount of freedom you have is dependent on your power and wealth, and you seek only duties, not responsibilities. Liberals have therefore historically been against trades unions, mass political parties and any other expressions of group solidarity. And logically enough, Liberal ideology led to individuals and groups seeking to “free” themselves and sometimes others from “outdated” social restrictions.

In some cases, this was entirely praiseworthy: Liberals were prominent in moves to decriminalise homosexuality and abortion and outlaw racial discrimination in the 1960s, for example. Yet these efforts were successful because they were seen, not as partisan demands by individuals, but rather as a necessary accommodation by society as a whole to changing times. Likewise, the move of educated middle-class women into the labour market at the same time was seen as an inevitable result of increasing university places, increasing demand for graduates, and an increasing tendency for middle-class women to want the kind of careers and status their fathers had. None of this was particularly controversial, and in an expanding economy there was room for all.

Yet there was already a strong undercurrent of the Liberal ideology of Power in all this. Ideas of interpreting the world in terms of Power were not new: Black Power had originated in the United States in the 1960s, and its iconography was taken up by the first feminists with their clenched fist symbol. In each case, there was an identified target (Whites, Men) from whom—in true Liberal fashion—benefits and power were to be taken away. As I’ve pointed out several times, much of this ideology was based on incoherent understandings of translated books and articles written by Michel Foucault, who wrote of pouvoir, the ability to get things done, not puissance, or crude coercion by force. Foucault was interested in how societies and organisations actually functioned, and the mechanics by which people accommodated to each other's’ wishes.

In fact, the informal rules by which society functioned were well understood at the time. For example, what was then called the Battle of the Sexes was a popular cultural trope: The War Between Men and Women was a common verbal formula before it became the title of a 1972 Hollywood romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Barbara Harris, based on cartoons by James Thurber. Indeed, it’s impossible to understand Anglo-Saxon popular culture of that era without recalling the pervasive image of the henpecked middle-class husband, packed off to the office every morning by his wife. The immensely popular late-70s BBC comedy series The Good Life, with Penelope Keith playing Margo Leadbetter the harridan with the heart of gold, owed much of its success to the fact that everybody could relate Margo and her nice but ineffectual husband Jerry to couples they actually knew.

But none of this was about power, it was about how people made pragmatic arrangements with each other, often unspoken, in order to be able to live together. Yet over the last couple of generations, the intellectual climate of the West has gradually come to accommodate the idea that, in reality, all relationships are about power, and nothing but power. Even at the societal level, there is an obsession with “empowerment” of various allegedly “powerless” groups, and with the doings of “powerful” people. Power, in the purely formal sense of huge salaries, lots of staff, big offices and the ability to dictate the lives of others, has become the universal index for measuring success, including the “success” of “marginalised groups.” Nothing else matters, not learning, not expertise or wisdom, not moral example. Naturally, this attracts psychopaths from all origins who are interested in power, and enjoy wielding it at the expense of others.

Yet most people actually don’t seek power over others, at any level, which is why these days the most capable people in organisations seldom rise to the top. But the obsession with describing everything in terms of power has also devastated personal relationships. What was once a daring, radical, continental-influenced academic theory that all relationships were expressions of power, has turned into a popular culture stereotype, reinforced by laws and institutional practices. But if all relationships are ultimately about power, what is the interest of entering into a relationship of any kind, especially if your social circle or the institution where you work continually scrutinises your relationship to look for inappropriate use of that power you are supposed to have? No wonder so many people prefer to be alone.

And this is the nub of the problem. All of the factors we have discussed have combined to produce a society which, however exactly you describe it—fractured, alienated, fragmented—at bottom is fundamentally unhappy, and being made more so by the disintegrationist effects of popular and political culture. We are in a paradoxical situation where society and its members have never enjoyed so many rights, yet have never been so unhappy. The point of course is that “freedom” in the abstract sense is not an adequate basis for constructing your life, and the more notional “freedom” we all have, the more authoritarian laws are require to stop society degenerating into anarchy. The “liberation” of the sixties and seventies now seems a naive dream from long ago. For example, a few years ago there was a rash of stories about how fifty years of feminism had not made women any happier. That may be true, but it ignores the fact that feminism never intended to make women happy: like all such movements of political mobilisation, it aimed to make people unhappy and resentful, so that they would follow self-appointed leaders in struggles against other groups. The story of the last fifty years has been one of bitter competition between interest groups, first  to divide society and then to rule the pieces. No wonder people are unhappy.

But society is like a broken porcelain vase: you can never put it back together as it was, and fatuous “community-based” initiatives dreamed up by governments can never succeed in the absence of actual communities. So as the cold realisation of what Liberalism has done creeps up the spine of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), the only solution is to formalise the developments I’ve just been discussing through the creation of virtual, ascriptive communities. These I refer to as tribes, or more properly neo-tribes, since they are artificial and not natural.

Recall the discussion about tribes earlier. Effectively, the last few decades have seen the re-creation of tribes, as a desperate expedient to somehow produce groups to identify with. In some cases (online discussion groups about films and video games, for example) they can be relatively benign, and resemble affinity groups. Others, though, are ascriptive neo-tribes which try to assign people to identities and oblige them to follow rules. There is inevitable competition between would-be leaders to ascribe people to different groups, since we all have several ways of identifying ourselves, and these ways may be at odds with how outsiders want to classify us. For example, in Britain, there is an ascriptive category “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic,” (BAME) better described as “un-white.” Yet its members have not asked to be put into this category , and even the constituent parts present problems: relations between Indians and Pakistanis, between immigrants from Africa and those from the Caribbean, never mind between Blacks and Asians, have always been problematic.

In either case, though, these neo-tribes display several of the same characteristics as traditional tribes do. The first is a tendency to internecine warfare if there is no common external enemy. We see this “myself-against-my-brother” phenomenon in the most trivial of situations: fans of Star Trek will defend it to the death against other TV science fiction series, but engage in violent flame wars among themselves over series and episodes they prefer. Increasing tribalism is thus the essential motor behind the progressive disaggregation of society, and the move away from universal to highly particular interests. Indeed, it can be argued—Ibn Khaldûn certainly thought so—that it is the natural sequence of events, unless an overarching ruling figure can impose the kind of group solidarity described earlier. For him, of course, this ideology was Islam, which enabled the otherwise anarchic forces of tribalism to be directed outwards, since “ the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” Some writers have seen the current fratricidal disunity in the Arab world as a result of the effective end of this injunction, not to speak of a long history of defeat and occupation. It might be speculated, in fact, that the popularity of Political Islam, even in its violent manifestations, is an attempt to recover this lost solidarity, not least among immigrant Muslim communities in Europe. After all, the enemy is unmistakably present for all to see: secular states, schools where boys and girls are educated together, mixed social gatherings, immodest dress and other blasphemies.

Western civilisation faces the same essential problem these days, in the absence of any interior or exterior reference point, religion, tradition or ideology for group solidarity. Society then continuously splinters into smaller and smaller fragments—the neo-tribes I have mentioned—each defining itself primarily against others. The best-known case is the luxuriant profusion of minority sexual orientations and preferences, too many now to list easily. Obeying the logic of tribalism, and in the absence of any group solidarity, such groups spilt into smaller and smaller units. Whilst they may in theory have a single overarching enemy (the heterosexual community, I suppose) that enemy is at too high and too general level to be of much practical use. And of course they have to compete viciously, not just with each other, but with other self-identified or ascriptive groups as well, not violently as would have been the case before, but for victim status, and thus for power.

For example, in France, as in most countries, the news has been full of Gaza in recent months. Yet most government pronouncements have not been about the sufferings of the Palestinians, but about the risk of anti-semitic outrages such as the defacement of memorials. The government has even promised an Application enabling such acts to be reported promptly. Whilst this does reflect the political power of the Jewish lobby in France, that lobby is not uniquely powerful. Leaders of various minority sexual preference groups have claimed that there is an unprecedented emergency in the hatred and discrimination they are suffering. Meanwhile, other interest groups are equally trying to defend their business models: in one university I sometimes teach in, there are posters everywhere claiming an unprecedented epidemic of sexual violence and harassment, with easy methods of reporting it to the authorities. Now in any political culture, you will get competing interest groups with their business models. But the problem with our culture today is that there are no big issues any more, only little issues trying to be big. This is exactly the kind of behaviour you find in tribes, where, almost by definition, no extra-tribal issue can have importance. And, like tribes even today, grievance groups compete with each other to loot the resources of the State.

But the most interesting similarity resides in the concept of Honour. Now it’s important to realise that we are not talking about modern western concepts of honour. We are not, in other words, concerned with right behaviour in one’s life and towards others, or the application of some universal code of ethics. Rather, “honour” here means something like Ego, or status. For example, the Iliad is often said to recount “the anger” or “the wrath” of Achilles, and indeed the Greek Mênis is actually the first word of the poem. Achilles is angry with Agamemnon for taking away the slave-girl Briseis, who was rightfully his. Generations of critics have dismissed Achilles as a boy sulking after losing his toy, but in fact the real issue was an irreconcilable clash between Agamemnon (de facto commander because he had the largest force) and Achilles, recognised by all as the best warrior. Achilles was frustrated and angry with what he regarded as Agamemnon’s inept leadership, and finally snapped at this display of arbitrary power which undermined his status and Honour. At first he wanted to kill Agamemnon, but then changed his mind and withdrew his Myrmidons from the battle, so, effectively, helping the Trojans.

In such tribal societies (whose remains are still with us) this concept of Honour, both individual and collective, is all-important. Once lost it can be regained only with great difficulty, and in a conflict between tribes the defeated party must necessarily lose its Honour. Small things—as with Achilles—can trigger lethal combat between groups and individuals: well into the nineteenth century, aristocrats fought deadly duels over trivial insults. This is comprehensible in the sense that in some contexts Honour, or Ego, is central to life, much more than money or formal power. It’s the same today: the psychiatrist James Gilligan spent many years dealing with the most violent criminals in American prisons, and wrote a number of books about his experiences. Strikingly, most of those he treated had killed for apparently trivial reasons: insults, or conduct by others they regarded as unacceptable. Even though they realised they risked severe punishment, they could not act otherwise without, as they saw it, destroying themselves psychologically. (There’s a faint echo of this, oddly, in West Side Story.) Immigrant gangs in Western Europe today behave similarly: there have been a rash of murders in France recently following apparently trivial incidents in school playgrounds, as entire families come to punish someone from another tribe. And Honour is a collective thing: a girl who wears western clothes or takes up with a non-Muslim boy deserves to be beaten, or even killed, because she has dishonoured her entire community.

You can see where all this is going, I hope. In spite of decades of relentless positivity (“you can be whatever you want to be!”) and endless “empowerment” initiatives, recent generations claim to feel unprecedentedly weak and vulnerable, and injured by the tiniest threat to their Egos. And I suppose if you have a temporary position in a poorly-funded research centre, among people you dislike, with no reliable friends and no secure future, the fragile sense of your own Ego is all you do have. So honour has now been reconceptualised as defence of one’s fragile Ego: micro-aggressions are the new insults that demand satisfaction in a duel. But because there are no more duels, still less Trojan Wars, satisfaction comes from destroying a member of another tribe, or a more distant member of your own, by hurling thunderbolts in the media. The consequences, of course, are not necessarily less destructive.

Modern western writing tends to assume a progressive linear development of societies, and that the kind of behaviour described above is just a bizarre anachronism. But older historians from different cultures were well aware that societies rose and fell. Ibn Khaldûn thought that no regime could last for more than three generations before it became decadent and declined. If he’s right, then we are entering the third generation of unfettered Liberalism now, and neo-tribalism may be the pattern of the future, as society disintegrates into smaller and smaller groups, both elective and ascriptive, looking for security among the few they believe they can count on. Not a happy prospect.