Amy Chua’s “Political Tribes”: ignore them at your own peril, even if you disapprove of individual gullibility
Since I published my own DADT-III book in early 2014, I’ve noticed increasingly combative behavior all over the world from people who view themselves as oppressed or, as I probably didn’t pay that much heed to at first, members of deliberately oppressed groups.
Carnegie Council speech, 2018
Amy Chua’s book “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations” certainly makes the case for why people tend to become belligerent together acting in groups. Tribal and group loyalty is hard-wired.
On p. 179, Chua mentions John Rawls’s 1971 book “A Theory of Justice” and notes that classical liberalism of previous decades tried to sell individualistic equality of opportunity in an environment of “group blindness” On p. 166, there occurs one of her most important statements, “The Left believes that right-wind tribalism – bigotry, racism – is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that right-wing tribalism – identity politics, political correctness – is tearing the country apart. They are both right.” Chua goes on to discuss the ideology of “intersectionality” and its misapplication by some elements of the Left. Indeed, the Russians picked up on this and manipulated social media algorithms to sew divisions in order to discredit American individualism and especially freedom of unregulated speech.
I have been personally dismissive of tribalism during most of my own writing career, seeing it as a tactic of the weak or of “losers”. No matter that Donald Trump could conduct a rally of sickening “Lock Her Up” chants the day before the November 2016 election, and yet talk about many people as individual “losers” in his zero-sum game world. Yet, for most people, tribalism is hard-wired (as she shows with accounts of experiments). It seems likely that artists, scientists, and sometimes mildly autistic people (including the gifted like “The Good Doctor”) are often genetically less likely to embrace tribal motives. Yet Chua sees this as elitism, and sees the intellectual elites as forming their own pseudo-tribe, Further she wraps this into a discussion of America as unusual as a “super group”. She gets into interesting analysis of how the Occupy movement expressed tribalism.
There are understandable reasons to believe this. Look at the horrid practices of many parts of the tribal world – female genital mutilations, for example. We laugh at arranged marriages. But when we think about it, we start to see that tribes take care of their own, indeed (as Carlson and Mero pointed out in their 2007 book “The Natural Family”) make less competitive individuals’ lives more valuable in a local, extended family setting – you could call it localized psychological Marxism. And tribal values make stable marriages sexually interesting for a large number of “ordinary people.” Think about how much of Sub_Suharan Africa is so vitriolically anti-gay because it is western and un-African – and dilutes reproductive potential of the tribe. Echo for Putin’s Russia.
Chua is not defending tribal behavior on moral grounds – she admits it leads to horrific results sometimes. In chapter 5, “Terror Tribes”, she explains how young men become terrorists as a group experience – and not because of individual oppression but because of western oppression of their religious groups. (Terror recruiting, however, online, does pray on economic disadvantage, but uses group identity to overcome individual weakness.)
Chua warns that the US, in particular, evades the reality of tribalism in foreign policy at its own peril. She gives interesting accounts of the tribalism of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela. She describes the Vietnam War (when I was drafted in 1968 although I remained stateside) in terms of Vietnamese nationalism v. the Chinese, where the South were as oppressive as the Communists. The course of my own life depended on the focus on anti-Communism, instead. When she talks about the Muslim countries, she warns about the naïve idea of introducing “democratic capitalism”, which seems to produce fine young adults in western countries when they are well educated, to tribal developing societies. She also explains Venezuela and the rise of Chavez in terms of racial politics, which led to a socialist catastrophe as Chavez consolidated power. I also recall the extreme ethnic tribalism of the early 1990s in the Balkans – and the tragedies of Bosnia, at the same time Clinton tried to lift the gay military ban in the US. And Russia has its own tribalism – with Ukraine (do the rest of us care about Russian v Ukrainian ethnicity),and Chechnya, which may have contributed to the Boston Marathon 2013 attack.
She does explain American tribalism largely in terms of race, although the whitelash makes it complicated – as does the idea that whites don’t have a historical claim to group oppression. I would have thought that intermarriage would be reducing these tensions. America has a karma problem – it settled the west by taking lands away from native Americans, and it enslaved blacks from Africa. All of this can feed identity politics today.
I’ve always seen myself as anti-tribalist. Yet, as a gay male, my upward affiliation only with white males with the “right” (according to my own imprinting) characteristics, which can invoke the idea that white males are often more differentiated from white females by body hair (because of evolution in colder climates) than is the case with races “of color”. Is this my own personal tribalism?
Tribalism does figure into the wars of the erosion of free speech. For some people, fixing old grievances by group trumps (pun) “personal responsibility” and atomized freedom. I have always viewed fixing problems with inequality at the individual level rather than through a group lens – but that leads to “rightsizing” and “pay your dues” type of thinking
Chua does, near the end, talk about the gradual acceptance of gay marriage in the west. But I’ve never accepted the idea of gay equality only through regarding “LGBTQ people” as a “tribe”. Indeed, Chua points out how intersectionality (and maybe Paul Rosenfels’s polarity theory) has divided the LGBTQ community into many potential small tribes of their own.
My own personalized speech is indeed a distraction from the “radical solidarity” demanded by tribalism. I can be seen as weakening my own group(s) even if I think I am doing good for “the world”. After all, groups on the radical right wanted to ignore the debt ceiling and blow up all federal entitlements. Those on the Left, as Michael Moore said, wanted to say “f__ you” to the system, even if it meant suicide. A passage where a radical Palestinian father said he would be fine with a son as a suicide bomber comes to mind.
Chua’s idea of the threat to democracy seems more tied to human hardwiring, than does Levistsky-Ziblatt (“How Democracies Die”, Feb. 23), which seems tied to the tensions of giving racial and sexual equality on an individual libertarian level, while removing the previous forbearance in national government that can trump over tribal identities.
Chua mentions Korea as one of the most ethnically distinct peoples on Earth. How does the recent contact of South Korea with Kim Jong In fly in the face of the idea that the capitalist south would never surrender its wealth to be “reunified”. This is no longer like Vietnam, and maybe never was.
Author: Amy Chua
Title, Subtitle: “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations”
publication date 2018
ISBN 978-0-399562853 hardcover also ebook
Publication: Penguin, 293 pages, indexed, endnotes, 8 chapters and an Epilogue
Link: publisher
(Posted: Monday, March 5, 2018 at 7:30 PM EST)
Author billsmePosted on March 6, 2018March 6, 2018Categories activism and the law, B-Books, Indigenous populations, political campaigns, population demographics, privilege, race, terrorism, tribalismLeave a comment on Amy Chua’s “Political Tribes”: ignore them at your own peril, even if you disapprove of individual gullibility