Editorial

E Unum Pluribus

DOG HAIR AND DUST BUNNIES. I gotta vacuum this place. It’s beginning to look like a barn. But I have no enthusiasm for anything in the summer. I need to hibernate (it’s actually called aestivation) until Labor Day. My favorite holiday. It celebrates the End of Summer! When the equinoctial winds of autumn begin to blow. Night overtakes day on the balance sheet, although at least I can take comfort in the fact that the days have been getting shorter for a week or so. I do my best work during the dark hours, with the windows open to let in the cool night air. I hate air conditioning, but I need it in the summer.

I’m still looking for an explanation why, on so many of these survival TV shows, despite the fact that the participants happen to be in tropical regions where the blazing sun propels temperatures in the day to near thirty-seven degrees Celsius, they complain about hypothermia risks when the sun goes down. I live in Rochester, NY. Hardly tropical. During July and August it still remains uncomfortably sultry when I take the dog out, say, at three in the morning.

I give up. My brain is too warm. That isn’t a good thing. If any aliens want to drop by and takeover my neck of the woods, they are welcome to it. Which makes me wonder why the world isn’t progressing the way science fiction has predicted it should for decades. The chances for a United Planets are slim. We can’t even get a United Earth right.

Now that Britain has caved to its “nutter” element and engineered a questionable withdrawl from the European Union (fondly nicknamed Brexit), and Scotland is reviving for the umteenth time its own independence campaign from the United Kingdom, one can only ponder how long it will be before the Iceni, Picts, Brigante, and other Iron Age tribes reorganize and demand a land of their own.

But England is hardly unique in going down this long and weirder avenue. In the U.S., the Republican Party, led by bloviating billionaire Donald Trump, is championing breaking with an entire host of trade groups and treaty agreements, selfishly pursuing isolationist and protectionist policies, to hell with the rest of the planet.

It ain’t suppose to be this way. Not according to the most popular and traditional science fiction tropes that have been the fodder of books, movies, and television since Heinlein was a pup.

A friend of mine from decades ago had a number of personal problems, none insurmountable. Instead of focusing on solving those problems, she became fixated with having plastic surgery done on her nose. There was nothing wrong with her nose. It was a fine nose. Her obsession was that if she had her nose “sculpted,” all of her problems would go away. This fantasy is not uncommon. I learned from her doctor that people will often turn to plastic surgery, believing somehow that a medical procedure will be the panacea that they need.

That’s almost like believing the magic words “Islamic terrorism” will send Al Qaeda and its ilk into a black hole never to be heard from again. All you gotta do is use them in conversation, some say. I think you need a wand to wave while you say them, however. I’m not certain about that. I will have to consult with our own ultra-conservative “nutters” in this country to find out.

Clearly, this kind of dementia has spurred new waves of tribalism. It flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from “Star Trek” and its United Federation of Planets. Rather than impressive assemblies seating representatives from the Klingon Homeworld, Ferenginar, Bajor, and so on, we have demagogues urging us to sever alliances with other nations on our own dismally meager ball of dirt. Like my misguided friend, these small-minded politicians believe that curbing immigration (we are a nation of immigrants, for Chrissake!), building walls, and repealing trade negotiations will open up a new 1950s post-war economic boom. They really love the 1950s, the Cold War, Jim Crow, closeted homosexuals, women relegated to the kitchen ...

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says about tribalism in his Internet blog: “The nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe—which seemed within reach a few years ago—is now succumbing to the centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking part. The Balkans have been Balkanized. Separatist movements have broken out all over—Czechs separating from Slovaks; Kurds wanting to separate from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; even the Scots seeking separation from England.”

In the U.S., this sort of silliness has been a running joke since the Civil War nearly split the country in two. If you don’t like the way the tribe does it, threaten to form your own tribe. In Upstate New York, factions for decades have been urging the formation of a new North New York State, believing that New York City gets preferential treatment. New York City also pumps the lion’s share of revenue into the state’s economy. They ignore that little factoid.

Between 1600 to 1800, Salem, MA, had such industry in pottery, tinwear, and manufactured goods that Salem was thought to be a separate country because the goods were simply marked “Salem.”

I can see a world where the nation state is dead, possibly replaced by ten thousand guilds all connected to the Internet. Of course, the immediate reaction is, “aren't those ten thousand guilds tribes?” Yes, but on a less-malignant level.

David Ropeik, in “How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous,” writes: “Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially, and often quite specifically, tribalism. Genocides are tribalism—wipe out the other group to keep our group safe—taken to madness. Racism that lets us feel that our tribe is better than theirs, parents who end contact with their own children when they dare marry someone of a different faith or color, denial of evolution or climate change or other basic scientific truths when they challenge tribal beliefs.”

What are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, Ayn Rand suggests that tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. If people accept the notion that reason is not valid ... they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. She goes on to write that if people accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that the individual has no mind and no rights, is nothing, but the group is all, and the only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—individuals will be pulled obediently to join a group.

These are just a few of tribalism’s negative aspects. I gleaned others from an excellent article by Yohannes Chain Metiku, originally published by the Africa News Service. Africa has a big problem with tribalism.

According to Metiku:

• Tribalism is aesthetically ugly, intellectually illogical, and practically inefficient. The ugliness mostly evidences as a blatant extortion of rightful possessions of the humbler citizens.
• The tribe is superior to others, and that as a result the others should serve and obey them.
• Members of a tribe constantly exaggerate and boast about the qualities, merits and good deeds of the tribe, refusing to recognize any faults.
• Members of a tribe indulge freely in liberalism and favoritism among themselves, but are very sectarian towards people in other groups.
• Tribes grant all privileges and posts of responsibility to themselves.
• Favoritism dictates the division of material benefits and the distribution of material services.
• Tribes believe that those who are not in the tribe are too rich and fortunate to deserve help.
• In politics, the supreme expression of tribalism consists of demanding the formation of so-called independent republics that have a tribal basis.

I often wonder what would happen if an extraterrestrial mothership, the size of Manhattan, parked itself in the atmosphere over Tehran and deployed thousands of warrior aliens—ugly brutes half-humanoid, half-squid, orange eyes, beaks for mouths, gooey tentacles for arms—that immediately began chowing down on the helpless Islamic population. Would we expedite the combined might of the U.S. armed services to help, fight back-to-back with the Iranian Army (Artesh) and possibly Al Qaeda and ISIL, too? Would the epiphany that we are all of a single species, sharing one hundred percent of our DNA, and in peril as an entirety, be enough to strip away tribalism?

I also don’t think it is possible to engage in five-year missions to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations as a subsection of planet Earth. Can you imagine a U.S. starcruiser in orbit around Metaluna trying to establish first contact with the indigenous species?

“Hello from Earth! We come in peace. We’d like to establish trade agreements with you even though we are unable to establish trade agreements among ourselves.”

“But we already had an envoy from your planet. We agreed to swap vodka for green stones. Who are you?”

“Aha! Those must have been people from Russia. We are Americans. We have exceptionalism. You need to trade with us.”

“Are you idiots? Go away.”

So you see. This is an untenable position. It cannot happen and probably won’t happen. I’d like to add to Drake’s Famous Equation the variable that any truly intelligent beings would have overcome intra-planetary tribalism and unified as one world with one government, one monetary system, one language, and even one genetic makeup the result of unencumbered racial interbreeding. Our survival depends on it.

Sam Bellotto Jr.