Tribalism

I was recently visiting in Chicago and had occasion to spend several days in the city seeing the sites and enjoying the wide array of locally prepared ethnic foods. Chicago is an interesting place; a true melting pot of different ethnicities that still manages to retain a certain amount of personal hospitality. I have always found that the crowded conditions of larger cities tend to change people’s attitudes about their fellow human beings. One would be tempted to think that such constant up close interactions would lead to greater understanding and more empathy but that doesn’t always seem to be the case. As a matter of fact, it seems that in most cases the exact opposite happens and humans begin to take on the importance and status of inanimate objects, a kind of flowing scenery devoid of personal feeling of any kind. I have always been a little curious why this should be so.

What is it about our nature that makes us prone to dehumanizing each other? Perhaps we are like locusts, the continual contact and rubbing against each other maddening us and sending us into some kind of uncontrollable frenzy behavior. This may explain some of the violence historically associated with large crowds that turn into angry mobs but it hardly explains the paralyzing apathy that seems to manifest itself in big city dwellers. As we rode the public transportation system of buses and elevated trains I noticed something new in this scenario; the proliferations of electronic devices that allow people to create their own small environment separate from everyone else. It seems that everyone was either on their phone, texting, or listening to I-pods with earpieces. It is like imaginary walls erected quite purposefully. I am an avid people watcher but it is something that I have never put together until this recent trip; the dependence on electronic devices to separate us emotionally from our physical environment. Thinking back, I see the same things on airlines and in terminals. I always equated it to the rush and stress of airports and the inherent uncertainties of airline travel but maybe it is more basic to our nature; a need for isolation from the great mass of humanity we see all around us.

Having been raised in a rather rural environment, I am well aware of the negatives that isolation can tend to enforce. It is the contact with other people, other ideas, that stimulates our growth as human beings. In isolation our views tend to molder. Without the injection of different perspectives and the variety of different viewpoints we never really evolve at all but become petrified or fossilized in partial truths that are supported with the narcotics of religion and tribal laws of inclusion. Small communities bond into tribal type factions where belonging is both a necessity and an impediment to free thought. The relative value of this inclusion is inversely proportional to the amount of isolation the community enforces. It isn’t really a matter of deciding who belongs as much as it is a matter of deciding who does not. The power to exclude is both the source of comfort that sanctions malaise and mental laziness and the article of faith that isolated communities have been built upon since the first civilizations came into being.

The opposite of this form of civilization has always been the large city; a place where ideas and cultures are endlessly varied and vibrant. The melting pots where different nationalities, people from varied backgrounds and cultures come to co-exist and live beside each other as they go through their daily lives. Chicago is an interesting example of this type of melting pot. Small communities based upon ethnic origin have gradually evolved into mixing pots for all cultures. Each area is marked with both its ethnic origin and the unmistakable imprint many other cultures at the same time. It is more a group of small communities stacked upon top of each other than a large cosmopolitan city. I was surprised the first time I visited at the amount of hospitality evidenced by the people one meets on the street, in the local businesses and restaurants.

Unfortunately, the human tendency towards tribal behavior is very strong and even in large cities one will find examples of group identification that overrides all other factors. Gangs are probably that most perfect example of this phenomenon but there are many others less starkly evidenced but still existent. It is manifested in varying degrees all the way from corporate levels to the homeless; the reality that there is both the safety of inclusion and the power of exclusion for each that lead to all sorts of assumptions that shape our lives. I am curious how and more precisely why people who live so closely with each other still choose to isolate themselves by race, religion, or ethnicity. On the one hand there is more diversity and a wider range of influences that in rural areas yet on the other there is still this tendency to isolate ourselves and identify with a small subset of the larger group and exclude everyone else as less important; less human.

While in Chicago we were taking a train back to my daughter’s apartment after an agreeable dinner at a nice Italian restaurant downtown. It was around 8:30 or 9:00 when we got on the train so it wasn’t very crowded with our small party of three women and a man and maybe six or seven other people who were mostly involved in isolating themselves. As we got on the train I noticed most of the people were concentrating very hard on ignoring their surroundings and all seemed intent on maintaining their own self imposed electronic isolation. Then I noticed a guy sitting across from us who was drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag. The train was rather noisy at the time so I couldn’t exactly hear what he was saying but he appeared to be singing out loud and very drunk at the same time. He looked to be Hispanic and was wearing nice dress slacks and a white chef’s shirt. He had a very short crew cut and several gang tattoos on display. He was generally trying to give the appearance of being a very rough person and succeeding admirably if that was his intent. He was also very drunk. As the train passed through a quieter section of tracks I could hear him ranting rather aimlessly, talking about God and how he knew what we were all doing and appearing to lecture everyone on the train about what God had in mind for them, slipping back and forth between English and Spanish and generally making an ass out of himself. It was an uncomfortable situation for everyone on the train except for him, who was rather oblivious to the fact that he was disturbing everyone else.

I noticed everyone else on the train doing their level best to ignore him completely; not a bad methodology in dealing with drunks who usually have a pretty short attention span to start with. My experience with alcohol and how it affects people is that they almost always become more and more self-centered the more they drink. It is a kind of tunnel vision wherein you not only don’t notice other people or their actions, they eventually become inconsequential in the increasingly primary theme of your own importance. I could tell he was close to this stage of becoming omnipotent in his own mind with no regard for anyone else. It was rather interesting to watch the other people on the train and their reactions to this one guy. It was kind of a group experiment in alternate reality where everyone is determined that if they don’t notice him, he really doesn’t exist. We had several stops to go through before we got to our stop so I settled in to the idea that we would just ignore him until we got off the train and watched the scenery out the windows as we rushed across the city.

At some point he took notice of our little group and alternately made comments that seemed rude or just curious but there were no overt actions taken and I continued to ignore him for the most part but my sense of caution was alerted and I was starting to get angry. It was the indignant kind of anger bred from disgust with the idea that a medium sized group of people were having their evening disturbed by one person’s drunken rudeness; the kind that grows with time. It wasn’t long before he was serenading a woman sitting on the front part of the car with what I assumed were some rather explicit lyrics in Spanish based upon the gestures that went with the lyrics in his performance. Preaching God’s terrible justice one minute and making lewd animalistic gestures the next is not a big leap for a drunk; it wasn’t the first time I had seen such mental gymnastics but it only added to my disgust with him and the situation in general.

My daughter’s friend got off at the next stop and as I hugged her and told her goodbye I could tell his focus was narrowing again as he eyed the empty seat next to my daughter. Sure enough as the train started again, he lurched across the aisle and leaned over to say something to her that I was quite sure none of us wanted to hear. By this time I had reached the limits of my patience. I grabbed his arm and told him he needed to get back on the other side of the train and he needed to do it NOW. I was trying to be calm but as the anger started to come out I could feel it swelling and growing in force and the “NOW” came out very loudly. I have struggled with a very bad temper for most of my life and I could feel it starting to gain control at that moment. It wasn’t a conscious decision but I immediately went from trying to articulate to wanting to explode, the way a tiny hole in a pressurized vessel will unleash explosive forces that instantaneously destroy everything in its path. I could feel it happening in slow motion and I no longer wanted to be rational, I wanted to feel his nose smash underneath my fist and I was going to enjoy it while it happened.

He was surprised. I could see it in his eyes which mine were locked onto now and there would be no more looking away.

“NOW” he asked? As if he couldn’t believe either the demand or the tone with which it was delivered but he saw it then. He saw the look in my eyes and suddenly he wasn’t the only thing the mattered in the world anymore. He was still drunk but he suddenly remembered there were other people in his world; he wasn’t the only one.
The whole incident died down after that. He didn’t exactly apologize but looked at me and said “God bless you” several times. I was still seething and not sure what would happen next but we got off the train without incident. Thinking back on it later, I don’t think he was afraid but suddenly saw me as part of his group, his species, and another viable human being who didn’t deserve to be treated with disrespect.

I wonder if we will ever get past our tribalism; the idea that OUR little group are to be treated differently from others. It seems to be so inherent in our species that we don’t even realize how much it affects everything we do. We enforce our separatism with all sorts of isolation techniques; religion, ethnicity, social status, geography, language, and even politics. As a species we seem to be extraordinarily and unhealthily focused on group dynamics and the power struggles that spring from separatism. Are we any closer to solving these problems with all out technological advancement or is technology in fact being utilized to widen and enforce separatism?