This is hopelessly abstract, with not a single reference to any actual historical group or political regime, let alone any rigorous research or writing. For nearly a decade I've watched people use the word "tribalism" to avoid thinking and have never seen anything to convince me of its value. Calling this high school level writing is unfair to thoughtful high school students.
I think this is a good piece of writing, the only part I disagree with is the claim that these thoughts would be broadly overlooked or disagreed with.
Seems I'm pretty much alone with this, but that's OK.
I agree with other comments that it should have more links to prior philosophical and anthropological studies.
This is not academic writing or an essay arguing for a point. At least, the point at rhetorical end seems a bit tacked-on.
To me this is a stream-of-consciousness like text.
Sometimes, being reductive helps in bringing a point across.
I think that the article does this well.
The close similarity of cronyism and tribalism is pointed out especially well, too.
My critique would be that the text is a bit engagement-baity. And it uses the simplistic rhetoric so well that for the most part it feels as if the author is arguing for an abandonment of law and a return to "tribalism".
The claim that people have "forgotten" the ideas of this essay seems unneeded.
A more humble tone would maybe make this post more interesting to many readers.
This article is so reductive that by the end I don't know who "we" are and what "we have" to preserve and appreciate or what modern state is worth fighting for if it's the one that raised us on the rule of law that that made us illiterate to the tribal nature that this same state is reviving through its failures?
Have we really forgotten it? What this author describes as "tribalism" sounds like what I think of as "the way things really work, underneath the fancy idealistic stories", which are ultimately propaganda meant to keep people from rising up and overthrowing the wealthy, for whose benefit those stories were made. There is no justice; there is no fairness; the law is a coin-operated cannon. Once you see this, much of what it does stops seeming so outrageous, and looks more like the predictable consequences of a thin abstraction layer over a system fundamentally built on violence and expropriation.
There are a lot of big claims here and literally not a single reference to anthropological research or even anything resembling it. This article is very badly argued.
I think many of the comments in this discussion are confusing the concept of "tribes" (in-groups & out-groups) with 'tribalism' - the form of civic society. This article is about the civic society called 'tribalism'. The contrast to 'tribalism' is 'rule of law'.
Tribalism is essentially a belief that the only reason others won't bully you is because they can't. Bully or be bullied. Rule of law instead says that it is the civic code who is the arbiter of right. 'Tribalism' vs 'rule of law' are both essentially frameworks of society and government.
This article seems to reduce the world to "fair and non-tribal" vs "unfair and tribal". These probably correlate. But it's not that simple.
For example, in many tribal societies, if a man from tribe A harms a man from tribe B, his own tribe might offer restitution to tribe B (or punishment for the criminal). In fact, disputes would often escalate to tribal leaders, who of course might be biased and only look out for their own, but not always. This was how peace was generally maintained. Otherwise, anytime someone from a tribe harmed someone from another tribe, there would be war.
Forgotten it? Tribalism has been one of the single biggest tropes in pop political rhetoric for at least a decade.
It's hard to find a political post on HN that doesn't invoke it in the comments.
J. K. Galbraith identified a solution to this problem utilized in the USA. A theory of countervailing power that relied on strong and stable institutions each doing a decent job of nonviolently representing the various interest groups at work. That time is gone; this too shall pass.
The word “modern” is misleading and confusing. Most “modern” people are tribalistic. What the author appears to mean is “western european.” People who have weak inter-familial ties, in comparison to most other people in the world, who organize themselves into tightly knit extended families.
wow: "Why would a clan that guarantees its own justice ever yield to a system that promises justice to its enemies? To do so is to voluntarily surrender its greatest strengths: the power to protect its own, punish its rivals, and maintain its position in the world. It is not merely a loss of advantage; it is the dismantling of the clan’s very foundation."
White nationalism and conservatism in a nutshell...
Yes. This put what I have been saying... "every day feels more and more like survival mixed with fuck you I got mine"... into much better words and concepts. I grew up poor and got involved with "tribes" where power was the goal and we learned growing up that you demonstrated your power. Lucky enough to have escaped that and to have matured into a passivist of sorts- I am troubled by the increasing tribalism and more and more feel my patience eroding and that itch in my id to demonstrate power...
Eh, the west has forgotten it. The rest of the world, played along and embraced it. The middle east- genocided flat along tribal lines. 99% shia, 99% sunnis, the rest all gone or about to go, copts, zhorotastrians, jesidi, druse, alewite, jehudi - and the genocide is still going on, burning its way through sudan.
Nobody cares about it, its right there in public, in the population statistics of the middle east- provided by the UN who never made a single resolution against it.
China is a pure ethno-state where every minority dwindles and vannishes - and some are kept around for a happy Disney dance around the reservation.
Turkey has thrown its proxxies ISIL/HTS into syria to continue the genocide on the kurds, driving them out of the towns towards the mediterranean, after its ally to the east has driven the armenians into retreat in mount kharabach.
Russia is deeply tribalist, the moscowian throwing the other minorities into battle to capture new minorities to throw into battle.
Its a grim world out there, once you rip the western centric googles from your eyes. Nobody cares about the law, about the west and about morals or history books.
One can present these two systems as equal alternatives but there is a very big difference. The system with the rule of law leads to much more prosperous societies than the tribal one. Corruption is economically extremely expensive. Like, one it really gets going, it can easily decrease GDP by a factor of 10. The same with dictatorships. As long as the dictator makes somewhat reasonable decisions it is more or less okay but any dictatorship is only a few bad decisions away from becoming much poorer. And when it depends on the good judgement of a single person these bad decisions are certainly going to come.