TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
Have you ever looked up a list of famous people from your hometown? If so, you probably felt a strange sense of happiness. I know I have. I've been surprised that this musician or artist I like is from my city or from a city nearby it. At first glance, this is a totally irrational thing to feel. Does some musician being from your city somehow make you a better person? No, not in the slightest. We all know this when we really think about it. Even in the same family there can be a remarkable difference in quality of individuals. So how much more it must apply for a small village and how much more for a city of any considerable size! So why do we have that feeling?
My suggestion: Our brains operate with very primitive hardware that hasn't been majorly upgraded since 10,000 BC or so. If you lived in a tribe of 40 hunter-gatherers or so, it would be very sensible for you to rejoice when one of those members succeeded at something like spearing a big mammoth. You would be able to eat a lot more meat that evening. You would have reason to believe in your own success, as the success of one member of the tribe truly was the success of all and vice versa. An ability to think of other members of the tribe AS yourself was a true prerequisite to survival back then.
We have a desire to be a part of a tribe at our deepest level. Most people in large cities have no culture around them. There is no genuine dwelling in large cities. They all feel the same, with the same fast food, the same music, the same smells, and, increasingly, the same languages. Right-wingers blame mass immigration for it, but mass immigration is more symptom than cause. The problem is that distinctive culture and communal activities have disappeared. People spend their days indoors, looking at screens. No one knows or cares about anyone around them. There are no tribes, but only a bunch of isolated individuals.
Today there are no tribes and so people become nationalists to fill the void. But this is dangerous. Nationalism is divisive, chauvinistic, cruel, and authoritarian. Nationalism leads to conquest and war. It is also mistaken. The "nation" exists far after culture and far, far after the tribe. The "nation" can and will be corrupted the moment someone of unsavory character takes the throne. Nationalism makes people placid and lazy as they do not have to work to be a member of a nation. Tribalism makes people active and energized, as the tribe's bonds are spiritual.
Politics is so ugly today because people don't just fight over practical issues of policy. They fight to define their tribes. In the past, a mayor could have one a campaign based on something like promising to build a bridge. In the present, any politician has to give someone a tribe to belong to, usually in terms of defining some kind of enemy. The enemy is almost always "the elites" in some form or another. And this is why there is such division. When all politics is bound up with the tribe, the very meaning of someone's identity is being attacked. All politics today is identity politics, no matter where it falls on the spectrum. And that is dangerous. It is much easier to compromise on a bridge than on an identity.
I guess it sounds hokey, but I do believe that the path towards a saner politics is to recreate the tribe so people can stop looking for it in the political world. But I don't know how easy it is to do that when most people are indifferent to if not flatly hateful of where they live and have more in common with online friends who live halfway across the world than their neighbors.