Here is a little piece that I wrote in March 2006
This item uses the example of Iraq to explore the contrast between civic and tribal society
The Example of Iraq
A couple of nights ago we watched the Panorama programme reviewing the British part in tha three years of US-UK military occupation of Iraq. As I watched I felt more and more strongly that underlying the commentary and the input of the various British politicians and officials there lay a serious naivety about the situation, though it was hard at first to put my finger on precisely what it related to. Slowly it clarified to me that what is being ignored and under-estimated is the importance of tribal loyalty. As I reflected upon this it seemed that it is actually a matter of much wider application than just UK forces in Iraq, though it is in a situation of that kind that it comes more acutely to a head. Much of the world does not live in nations, it lives in tribes and the assumption that systems designed for secular civic nation states will work when imposed upon religious kinship tribal societies is naive indeed.
Tribes are Basic
Tribe is, perhaps, the most natural form of social organisation. It is simply the outgrowth of family. A tribe is a big family. Its members are connected by kinship bonds. The tribe provides social security. If one is sick, one looks to other members for care. If one is attacked, one looks to them for mutual defence. When one is old, they are the ones who will see you through.
Empire
The Classical period of history was a period when a hierarchy of tribes emerged, eventually resulting in large empires. This led to the emergence of some first ideas about a completely different way of organising society that we might call rationalism. Rationalism and tribalism operate on quite different assumptions. The Empire stretched the resources of the dominant tribe and made necessary recruitment from the ranks of the conquered. This solution involved promoting loyal or accomplished people to citizenship by which was meant honorary membership of the dominant tribe. Thus, in Europe, the number of Roman citizens was steadily augmented from the ranks of the subjected. This sort of solution works well for a time but then eventually dissolves its own basis since what made citizenship worth having was membership of a clan, but when one reaches the point where the majority of members are not related to one another even ethnically, the system tends to fall into meaninglessness or its centre of gravity shifts. Portugal attempted a similar solution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was partly a consequence of the fact that the Portuguese, the first European power to establish a global seaborne empire, were less reluctant than other subsequent European colonizers to intermarry with indigenous populations. The system adopted by Portugal was to offer Portuguese citizenship to indigenous people who showed loyalty and reached a certain educational level. To begin with this worked well. However, it eventually became apparent that if it continued, the capital of the empire would soon be Rio da Janeiro, not Lisbon. The capital of the Roman Empire did indeed move to Byzantium, outside Italy altogether.
Feudalism
Anyway, the Roman experiment was successful for an extended time but then collapsed. Tribal society returned to Europe and a second method of building larger social structures upon a tribal base evolved. This was feudalism. Where empire had basically been the extension of one tribe’s power over all others leading to the need to augment the ruling tribe from below, feudalism was, to a large degree, a bottom up arrangement in which weak tribes sought the protection of stronger ones, offering fealty in return for protection and thereby turning powerful chiefs into overlords. In feudalism, loyalty was even more centrally the currency than it was in empire. The feudal system served Europe for about a thousand years - a little longer than the Roman experiment. It created mega-tribes that eventually started to think of themselves as nations - France, England and so on.
Caste
Outside Europe, there were other experiments going on. Another method of integrating tribes into a larger system is the method called caste. In India most notably but also in many parts of the world in varying degrees, tribes have retained their integrity within larger social systems by monopolising a niche in the economic system. Within feudal Europe, the Jews were effectively a caste group. They were subject to different rules from all the other players in the social game. Caste can generate powerful competition, sometimes spilling over into violence, and so can be a mixed blessing. However, even today in, say the North East states of India, one can observe a social process whereby tribal groups are finding their way into the larger Indian social system by reinventing themselves as caste groups. A caste system is somewhat more flexible than a feudal one because it is linked to economics and supply and demand factors can therefore change the effective relative status of whole groups quite substantially. It is also a tenacious sytem - once you have got it it sticks.
The Civic Nation State
Modern Europe has adopted a different system again. This is the system called the nation state. A nation state is an attempt to create a super-tribe. Where tribes number in hundred and thousands of people, nations run from tens of millions upwards. Within a nation the ideal is for all citizen members to have equal rights. This, therefore, becomes the arena for individualism, rights based law, national institutions, state welfare systems that provide standardized social security arrangements and so on. It has been with us sufficiently long now that Europeans have to a large degree forgotten how tribalism works and lost sight of the fact that nation states do not necessarily appear to everybody on the planet to be the natural way of organising.
Within the nation state, things are, in principle, organised on a rationalist basis. This makes nation states good at organising resources on a large scale and therefore at winning wars. There is a constant pressure towards the wider and wider application of the principles of equality and interchangeability. This means that increasingly people work for extrinsic reasons rather than for intrinsic or participatory ones. Although the nation state is very effective as a war machine because of its generally machinelike quality, it is, for exactly the same reason, particularly vulnerable to sabotage. Imposing a nation state upon a situation like Iraq where such sabotage based warfare is already endemic and where the basic social structure is tribal with limited feudal overtones, is likely to be a very slow up-hill struggle and one has the impression that the time scale it would require simply is not going to be available.
Anomie
A further reflection that follows on from this is whether the nation state system is all it is reputed to be in any case. Pushed to its logical end, would it dissolve itself just as the other systems do? In all probability the answer is yes. The factors keeping nations cohesive include many that are hang overs from the more fundamental tribal structure. These may be watered down into a class system that still permits considerable social mobility, but were any country to be organised on completely rationalised lines it is doubtful if there would be anybody who would love it sufficiently to make the effort to keep it in being. Total fairness is probably soul destroying. Humans do not, when we come to the bottom line, want to be all treated exactly the same. They want a substantial element of ascription in social organisation. I suspect that our own civilization is in decline and that this is a function of having gone further than the system will take. As De Tocqueville pointed out, beyond a certain point, democracy is a recipe for mediocrity.
Spiritual Community
Then another reflection is to ask where the religious style of organisation fits into all this. A religious community is a kind of tribe. It is, however, not based on kinship. It is a kind of affinity tribalism. I have long felt that something of this kind represents the most fruitful way forward. There would be much to say for a society that is not an aggregate of independent individuals but is a matrix of affinity communities. This incorporates a mix of choice and loyalty, not a valuation of choice as the supremely desirable option. Endless choice is not all good news. On the other hand, some choice is essential to the health of a society or destructive pressures can reach revolutionary proportions. There has to be some room in any social system for people in transition. Even feudal societies had their mercenaries and their pilgrims and a career in the church offered a way round the main structure of lifelong fealty. Communities do, however, need some stability and contemporary society works against this. In fact, for many people, one of the most stabilizing institutions, unfortunately, in contemporary society is debt.
Modern people entering a religious community are aware of a loss of self-determination and for many this is more than they can cope with. Reared to modern norms, they are programmed to feel resentment at anything that suggests curtailment of autonomy. They do not see that this autonomy is coupled with the life of extrinsic rewards that they found so unsatisfactory - a dissatisfaction that was, often enough, a significant element in their decision to choose the religious life in the first place. This is why the religious life has extended probationary periods - visitor, traineeship, postulancy, novitiate. Most candidates do not progress beyond the first or second step. Those who do, do so because they have entered into a process whereby their whole outlook is changed. In their new outlook, they may find life immensely more satisfying than they did in their pre-entry mode, but it is difficult for the neophyte to imagine this. In this sense, therefore, the religious community swims against the current of modern life - it really is an alternative society in embryo - more personally satisfying, more versatile, more mutually supportive, more sound ecologically, altogether more divine. The transition of consciousness required, however, is substantial.
The sort of community just described is, in my view, the community of the future. It is about as difficult for contemporary people to imagine, however, as the kin-tribal society of a country like Iraq. Every society tends to have a blind spot for alternative ways of being. Sustaining a social structure is substantially a matter of preventing people thinking about anything else - there is far more censorship in our society than we realise.
Iraq Again
The Western politicians who now have temporary control of Iraq appear to regard the indiginous tribal method of organization as primitive and redundant and label its practices - according to which a person is not going to treat members of his own tribe the same as he treats those of other tribes even if he is a policeman - as corrupt. What the West calls nepotism is, in many parts of the world, regarded a proper loyalty and fulfilment of important social obligation. Failure to understand this is the kind of factor that will wreck the Western initiative in Iraq far more effectively than any insufficiency of firepower.
Non-Conclusion
So I do not have a conclusion for this little essay, aside from a plea to be more appreciative of the basic tribal structures that underlie all human society. To design an eco-friendly, sustainable, emotionally satisfying, less war-prone society for the future, we have to reach a post-individualist, post-secular, affinity tribalism of some kind. In this, religion will play an important part. At present the world is torn between the secular mechanistic model and the pre-individualist tribalism of much of the world. Probably neither system is sustainable and at the points where they come most acutely into juxtaposition, as in Iraq, the mutual incomprehension that results spells disaster.
Replies
Thanks, Jan. Yes, retribalisation of some kind is necessary for social sanity.