Tribalism, Misanthropy, and the Lesser Evil

Is optimism about the typical human potential really the correct attitude. Isn’t that just Manichean naivety,some people are stupid, weak, unskilled and uncooperative, others are smart, strong, skilled, and helpful, most people fall in the middle. Isn’t a more reasonable to say, I don’t know you, I will act cautiously and perhaps build trust over time.

I don’t think normative tribalism is best described as “People in our tribe are more intrinsically valuable than people in other tribes.” It’s not about intrinsic valuableness, it’s about obligation. As in, “we are linked to people in our tribe by ties of mutual obligation in ways that we are not linked to people outside.”

For instance, your family members aren’t inherently more valuable than other people, but you still owe them something that you don’t owe other people.

Those ties could be justified by ideas about your tribe members being inherently more valuable, but they certainly don’t have to be. They might just be justified by the idea that stuff works better if we act like we’re obligated more to our families (and our larger tribes) than other people, and if other people do the same. If we thought people in our tribe were more valuable, we’d think other people should be also acting on behalf of our tribe as well. But I don’t generally see people who are proponents of closed borders (as an example) saying that other countries should have open borders to take needy members of our communities in. Instead, there’s the understanding that other countries will also try to protect their members, and that that’s a fine thing to do.

Jeff:

No less quixotic than trying to end other kinds of bigotry. I don’t think that’s really feasible, but it’s something to work towards to. At minimum, I do not think government should be enforcing laws that serve primarily or only to support bigotry.

To me, a big part of the open borders movement is really just abolishing arbitrary immigration restrictions. “Because they’re foreign” in of itself should not be a reason for government to treat someone like a criminal, or worse, hostile combatant. Most immigration restrictions used to be based on the “Because they’re the wrong race” but now since that’s politically incorrect, in most countries today immigration restrictions are implicitly justified based on the “Because they’re the wrong nationality” argument. It’s no less quixotic to struggle against this than it was quixotic to struggle against government-enforced racism.

Most people try to lend new immigration restrictions today the veneer of non-bigoted/-tribalist respectability by asserting that things like economic policy merit these restrictions. But most of these claims — especially those from the most strident restrictionists — lack any empirical grounding. The claims about immigrants’ impact on the public fisc, or their impact on native employment/wages are at best blown completely out of proportion (is the best solution to a .3% annual decline in wages for low-skilled natives to ban immigration, or is it to invest in other kinds of policies to assist these people?) and more often totally unfounded (e.g. the claims that Mexican immigrants to the US are virtually all terrorists or drug smugglers). It’s the modern equivalent of claiming we need to deport all the Jews in order to reduce the rate of infanticide.

I’d be happy to support (or at least tolerate) immigration restrictions where clear and present dangers are obvious and backed by sound empirics. But otherwise, they’re just government-enforced bigotry. It’s no more reasonable for Americans to ban Mexican immigration because they’re afraid Mexicans are drug traffickers than it was for white Americans to enslave black Americans because they were afraid that black Americans would murder and rape them otherwise.

Ever since hoplites used the phalanx to defeat the Persians, teams outcompete individuals. Coalitions are precarious, and have inefficiencies of scale at some point, but still, tribalism seems an optimal strategy in many scenarios.

Barbara Ehrenreich highlighted this when she tried to get a job w/o connections for one of her books (she’s the muck-raker who wrote Nickel and Dimed). She’s a smart woman, a best-selling author for the NYT, but she couldn’t get a job. You need connections, and they form your in-group, your tribe. Once there, you can then tell yourself that it’s all about objective merit.

I will never be in the tribe of football fans. Yet I am very happy they exist, because their fandom pays a large part of my paycheck!

“If you’re optimistic about the potential of the typical human, you’ll see out-groups as opportunities for mutually beneficial trade.” But how optimistic should one be? True, out-groups are potential trading partners, but they’re also potential aggressors. The justification for tribalism is not so much one’s views about outgroups’ stupidity, weakness, and lack of skill; it is one’s fear of their uncooperativeness (= aggression). How rational such a fear is, in any given case, will depend on the circumstances.

By the way, Bryan’s post seems to be structured around seeing tribalism as “me & my tribe” while seeing outsiders as individuals.

But, more often than not, outsiders (to the US) are even more tribalist than we are!

The dynamics between tribe and individual outsider are different than between tribe and tribe.

One problem: When we combine “Only my sort of people have rights” and “Foreigners can be useful,” we might end up with slavery. OTOH, that’s better than genocide.