Editorial

Let’s All Get Along ... or Maybe Not

LAST MONTH WE PUBLISHED an editorial bemoaning the coming tribalism in the world. Britain has separated from the European Union, Scotland wants to leave Britain, the Irish want their own emerald island back, the Mideast wants to rearrange itself along religious and ethnic lines not drawn by the British after WWI, and all over the world various groups want to cast off the yoke of Colonialism. Even Canada (Oh, My God!) has a “Quebec sovereignty movement” which wants French-speaking Quebec to separate from Canada. Toronto wants to be its own province.

“Canadians are just like Americans, only nicer.” Someone said. So can America be far behind? An Initiative to split California into six states, (N., S., and W. California, Central California, Jefferson, and Silicon Valley) again failed to make the ballot for 2016. But at least they weren’t trying to go independent ... yet. Texans frequently ponder separating into five states, (Plainland, Trinity, Gulfland, New Texas, and El Norte) which they retained the right to do without Federal approval since joining the United States in 1845. But no, they can’t secede from the Union again. That matter was settled in 1865.

Many states have absolutely no reason for staying together—NYC and upper New York State? Boston area and the rest of Massachusetts? Eastern and Western Pennsylvania? Whereas improvements in travel and communication might have given these states an easier way to connect with each other, they also made it easier to hop on a train and focus one’s energies elsewhere.

Even the Soviet Union has disassembled itself, replacing the USSR with Russia and a dozen or so mostly tribal states. What’s going on? Why would anyone want humongous agglomerations of territories anyway? Why in fact do you live near anyone, instead of in some remote place? Why is it that some “countries” are a mere few hundred square kilometers?

Whatever the optimum answer is, I suggest that society is ready for a total reorganization, preferably without the old methods of invasion and warfare and ethnic cleansing, based totally on what people desire for themselves, and with Internet connections for everyone.

There were once discussions about crafting “tribes” whose people were connected only via Internet. Still not a bad idea—countries would have a difficult time engaging in warfare. But the evolution of the Internet might do the same thing all by itself. For example, I have an “Internet neighborhood,” albeit I can’t easily get together with living humans. I think, for now, this is a disadvantage. The exchanges between flesh and blood people is deeper and more satisfying than Internet texting. Will virtual reality change this? Probably. And probably for the better. Already, most relationships seem to have started by electronics, the rest of them by automobile.

So what might the ideal be? In America, in the late 1800s up until the Great Depression, towns were often known by their product. Take Auburn, IN, for example: The Auburn Automobile Company, founded in 1900, produced its first automobile in 1903. William Wrigley, Jr. and E. L. Cord controlled the company that eventually acquired Duesenberg, Lexington, and Lycoming. The company failed in August 1937.

Or my small town, Southbridge, MA, American Optical made eyeglasses for the world. Starting In about 1833, AO grew to a giant, employing perhaps 5,000 people in this small town. If you see Civil War soldiers wearing spectacles, they were made not a mile from where I now sit. Financial shenanigans and management’s staunchly held belief that plastic would never replace quality glass lenses lead to their rapid demise in 1975. They still make a few things, but they are one percent as big as they once were.

In the rest of the world, hometowns are known for their companies as well. Wetzlar and Jena, Germany; Coventry, England; Armonk, NY; Culver City, CA; Detroit, MI; Maranello, Italy. Often there are several anchor companies. The skills found in these towns tend to accumulate and can last for a century or more.

Corporations are not people, despite what Mitt Romney said, but I am pointing out that homogenization leads to blandness. Concentrations of people, tribes, with distinct goals and interests is frequency advantageous to human progress.

The “melting pot” of America might be seen as a way to make everyone the same ... Americans. But the melting pot called America is for the most part, respectful of individual ethnicities, and ideally uses the best of all cultures to make it great. But America struggles with individualism versus tribalism like everyone else.

There are many reasons one group might want to consider itself separate from another: demographic similarity, rural-urban divides, shared cultural-ethnic background, economic interest, geographic boundaries, and on and on. But the most important reason for calling yourself a separate tribe is language. Regional languages can develop for other reasons, such as geography. There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. About 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Nigeria alone has over 500 distinct languages. We assume many of them are spoken by only a few people. The most popular language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. The Chinese “dialects” of Cantonese, Hakka, Shanghainese, etc., are just as different from one another (and from Mandarin) as Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian.

Communication across the globe necessitated forcing people to speak English, French, and a few other tongues. By the way, the official “FAA and ICAO World Aviation Language” is a shortened form of English that contains only 250 words. If you’re a pilot from Belarus landing in Guadeloupe, you speak English. Computer code is written in English, too.

A study of Switzerland is helpful in understanding what the world is becoming. Despite having four major languages, virtually everyone speaks English. “Although Switzerland is dominated by the Protestant and Catholic religions, is highly educated, and has one of the best living standards in Europe, its longtime history of tolerance has made it fertile ground for a number of unusual faiths,” said an article in the “New York Times” about the Solar Temple massacre. It noted that there are 90 to 120 such wacky groups in Geneva alone. I’m for it—not because I think I’d like to live in many of the tribes in Switzerland, but I imagine one or two might be just fabulous.

Robert B. Reich, in “The New Tribalism and the Decline of the Nation State” (March 23, 2014), wrote about this coming tribalism—and some think regrettable decline in nationalism.

Reich wrote: “We are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from nation states. The same pattern can be seen even in America, especially in American politics.

“Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them. Kings and emperors imposed temporary truces, at most.

“But in the past three hundred years the idea of nationhood took root in most of the world. Members of tribes started to become citizens, viewing themselves as a single people with patriotic sentiments and duties toward their homeland. Although nationalism never fully supplanted tribalism in some former colonial territories, the transition from tribe to nation was mostly completed by the mid twentieth century.”

So this nation-state building is viewed as some sort of superior arrangement. We are far better off, Reich thinks, if we are organized into huge national groups where the King or Queen can order us to go bash in the heads of others in some nation state. We will carry a colored rag on a pole to symbolize the nation’s power.

Now technology, Reich continues, “has whittled away the underpinnings of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that economic security depends less on national armies than on financial transactions around the world. Global corporations play nations off against each other to get the best deals on taxes and regulations.”

Global corporations may well be playing off countries against each other, but Reich ignores the real problem: nation states have very nearly outlived their usefulness. Looked at from some future history, the nation state might have died with Hiroshima.

Depending on how you count them, there are between 189 and 196 independent countries in existence. Why should there not be tens or hundreds of thousands, as there are small towns?

I fundamentally agree with Reich. Tribalism is pulling the country and the world apart. But two contradictory things are happening simultaneously: the nation state is becoming less relevant, while the tribes are clinging together and acting without the benefit of the nation state. And all this is being driven by the rise of individualism.

Collectivism is the philosophy that the individual has no rights and no importance that the group does not give. This “sticking together” is at the core of nationalism, military service, religious groups, tribes ... any group that for whatever reason has bonds.

Craig Biddle, editor of “The Objective Standard,” writes: “Individualism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It’s the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected.”

Individualism is a threat to the group. Individualism is discouraged wherever groups occur, although publically celebrated. Biddle says that “individualism” is best. I can’t say this is true, but it seems best for how I want to live. And I think this is a good thing. The smaller a functional group can be, the closer it is to the individual. The larger it is, the more bureaucratic and collective it is. Tribes are good.

So I am not worried about tribalism in the world. I am worried about having huge countries with massive homogenous societies, with arcane politics, military-industrial-complexes and the desire to fight each other.

Let’s scramble it up and make some omelets.

Eric M. Jones