My view: Rampant tribalism: The world degenerates

I’m curious why so many people refer to the worldwide wave of xenophobia as “populism.” Another word could be “racism,” but perhaps that’s a bit too harsh. I prefer to think of it as a rebirth of the tribalism that dominated the human race from its inception until the unifying efforts of the 20th century.

If “a page of history is worth a thousand of logic,” consider the full sweep of history. For millennia, the Northern Hemisphere from Asia to Europe and Northern Africa was the locus of a sweep of empires back and forth — Egyptian, Hittites, Israelites, Babylonians, Alexander, Rome, the Caliphate, Ottomans. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the globe was “settled” by European colonialism.

The two spasms of German restlessness leading to the two World Wars produced simultaneously two developments: efforts to organize global security and a corresponding globalized economic environment. All this worked reasonably well, surprisingly enough, during the Cold War — again with spasmodic tragedies such as Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Cold War coincided with the end of the age of empire. Nation-states were gaining independence and striving to join the globalized economy.

What they found with their new independence was that they really didn’t like each other. Aided by the internet, people could now see what others had that they wanted and didn’t have. Trade goods showed how different other cultures could be.

With the demise of both the European empires and the Soviet Union, the cork popped out of the bottle. There was no more Tito to hold the Croat-Serb-Bosniak cultures in check. American-trained al-Qaida was free to pursue the Sunni Wahhabism violence promoted by Saudi Arabia. The Hutu majority in Rwanda, no longer under the thumb of the Belgians, was free to slaughter their Tutsi former oppressors. And so it went — Sunni against Shiite, Timor against Indonesian, untold numbers of tribes in Papua New Guinea. Most recently, the Wahhabi ideology has spread to the rest of Africa, with al-Shabaab and Boko Haram at the forefront of killings that started decades ago in Somalia, Chad and the Sudan.

The “civilized” world reacted to all this chaos with special tribunals (the ICC, ICTY, ICTR, STL, all in The Hague and others in hot spots such as Cambodia and Sierra Leone). None of this has had any effect on the brutality and cruelty of those driven by their tribal hatreds.

Look further back in time and question the slogan that “bigots are made, not born.” Studies show that human infants learn early to recognize their own family and expand out to their own clan and more cautiously to strangers. Perhaps this is an evolutionary quirk for collective defense in an uncivilized world. It may be that we need to learn tolerance and cooperation both for the rational reason of security in an interlocked world as well as for moral reasons of shared humanity.

However that part of evolution works, civilization began with wars among tribes, but advances came when tribes joined into coalitions. Even the 12 tribes of Israel probably fought with each other before forming a coalition to take Canaan away from the other indigenous tribes, then splitting apart and dispersing. Charlemagne was able to create the Holy Roman Empire by leading his Franks to defeat many other Germanic tribes. The six nations of Northeast America almost certainly fought with each other until they realized they could do better as the Iroquois Confederacy (which some historians credit as having had an influence on the U.S. Constitution). These coalition examples may have occurred in ancient times only when there was a combination of a sufficiently close ethnicity and topographical convenience.

Still more fascinating are the ethnic similarities among all the Semitic tribes now warring in the Middle East and similarities among the Balkan cultural groups who produced such atrocities as Srebrenica and Omarska.

What causes ethnically similar cultural groups to split into tribalism? Maybe the cultural and physical anthropologists can provide at least some tentative answers. But for our purposes now, the key is simply in recognizing what is happening globally as we descend into tribal warfare.

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have played on the same theme: my tribe is better than your tribe and we want our INDEPENDENCE. What are they going to do with independence in an interlocked global economy? What could possibly make a rational person think that isolating oneself from the rest of the world is a positive benefit? Answer: nothing. These are totally irrational sentiments driven by nothing but cultural (I don’t say racist) feelings of group identity. It’s not racism — uneducated Britons hate Germans, who hate French, and so on, all within the same Caucasian grouping across Europe. And I don’t believe that Arab jihadism is driven by religion any more than the KKK or the current anarchy of the American militias has been driven by religion — frankly, I can’t believe that a member of the KKK or an American militiaman knows any more about Christianity than the foot soldier in the Islamic State group knows about Islam.

Where does all this lead me? First, we stop talking about populist anger at the establishment. That anger may exist, but it is largely irrelevant to the greater problem facing the world today. We need to address rampant tribalism for what it is — groupthink of the most poisonous variety. Tribalism is back and it threatens all of us very seriously.

Wayne McCormack is E.W. Thode Professor of Law at the University of Utah.