Posted: 18 Aug 2013 09:20 PM PDT
Man begins with the
tribe. The tribe is his earliest civilization. It is enduring because it is
based on blood. The ties of blood may hinder its growth, the accretion of
tradition holds it to past wisdom while barring the way to learning new
things, but it provides its culture with a physical culture.
The
modern world embraced post-tribalism, the transcendence of tribe, to produce
more complicated, but also more fragile cultures. And then eventually
post-tribalism became counter-tribalism.
Our America is tribal, post-tribal and counter-tribal. It is a strange and
unstable mix of all these things.
The post-tribal could be summed up by the melting pot, a modernist idea of a
cultural empire, the E pluribus unum of a society in which culture could be
entirely detached from tribe, manufactured, replicated and imposed in
mechanical fashion. The counter-tribal and the tribal however are best summed
up by multiculturalism which combines both selectively.
Modernism was post-tribal. It believed that advancement lay with abandoning
the tribe. Post-modernism however is counter-tribal. It doesn't just seek to
leave the tribe behind, but to destroy the very notion of one's own tribe as
the source of evil, while welcoming the tribalism of the oppressed.
The post-tribal and counter-tribals both felt that the rejection of one's own
tribe was a cultural victory. But where the modernists thought that tribe
itself was the evil, the post-modernists think that it is only their tribe
that is the evil. The modernists had no more use for the tribalism of any
culture than that of their own. The post-modernists however believe that the
tribalism of oppressor cultures is evil, but that of oppressed cultures is
good. And so they replace their own tribalism and post-tribalism with a
manufactured tribalism of the oppressed consisting of fake African proverbs
and "Other" mentors.
Counter-tribalism is obsessed with the "Other". It regards the
interaction with the "Other" as the most socially and spiritually
significant activity of a society. Counter-tribalists instinctively
understand diversity as a higher good in a way that they cannot express to
outsiders. They may cloak it in post-tribal rhetoric, but the emotion
underneath is the counter-tribal rejection of one's own identity in search of
a deeper authenticity, of the noble savage within.
For the modernists, tribalism was savage and that was a bad thing. For the
post-modernists, the savage was a good thing. The savage was natural and
real. He was a part of the world of tribe and blood. A world that they
believed that we had lost touch with. It was the civilized man and his
modernism that was evil. It was the tribalism of wealth and technology that
they fought against.
The modernists believed that culture was mechanical, that it could be taken
apart and put back together, that fantastic new things could be added, the
boundaries pushed into infinity in the exploration of the human spirit. The
post-modernists knew better. Culture was human noise. Boundaries defined
culture. When they were broken, there was only the fascinating explosion of
anarchy and private language. Communications broke down and elites took over.
They stepped outside those boundaries and lost the ability to create culture,
instead they went seeking for the roots of human culture, for the tribal and
the primitive, hoping to become ignorant savages again.
The modern left has become a curious amalgam of the modern, the post-modern
and the savage. There you have a Richard Dawkins knocking Muslims for their
lack of Nobel prizes and then side by side is the post-modern sneering at the
idea that being celebrated by the Eurocentric culture and its fetishization
of technology matters compared to the rich cultural heritage of Islam and the
savage on Twitter demanding Dawkins' head.
The same scenes play out on daily commutes in modern cities, where
Bloombergian post-tribal social planners exist side by side with Occupier
counter-tribals and violent tribal gangs acting as flash mobs in the
interplay of liberalism, the left and the failed societies left behind by the
systems of the left.
Muslim immigration is a distinctly counter-tribal project. The European
tensions over it among its elites, as opposed to the street protesters who
make up groups such as the EDL, is a conflict between the post-tribals who
envisioned the European Union and the counter-tribals who view it as a
refugee camp that will melt down the last of Europe's cultures and
traditions.
This is the peculiar uncertain place that the left is in. It's no longer
modern, but its ideas were put into place by modernists, its elites share the
modern bias for progress, but have grown skeptical of the technology that
makes for progress, and their rationalism is tainted by romantic political
codes. Its old notions of the inevitable forward march of man sits side by
side with the grad student in ethnic studies who believes that the best times
were in the past.
The left has shrunk down to a social welfare movement obsessed with
perfecting the municipal governments and non-profits that administer cities
filled with savages. Its self-image is elitist, but its horizons are
hopelessly petty. It reflexively backs absurd identity politics causes
because there is nothing else for it to do except embrace its own
dissolution.
The counter-tribal seeks its own destruction. Unlike the
modernist post-tribal, it has no horizon. It is suffused with ennui, with an
awareness of the evils of its own white privilege, its capitalism, the blood
that its ancestors spilled and their endless crimes against man and the
environment. It measures enlightenment in relation to its suicidal
tendencies. The truly aware and educated individual is a member of a culture
that believes it has no right to go on existing.
Counter-tribals and post-tribals both measure advancement in relation to the
rejection of the tribe. The difference is that post-tribals did so because
they believed that another level of civilization lay ahead, while the
counter-tribals believed that the tribe was evil.
The modern West is dominated by counter-tribals, with a strong post-tribal
influence. But the post-tribals rarely challenge the counter-tribals. When
they do, the boot of political correctness, a construct largely used by
counter-tribals to suppress post-tribals and the wrong sorts of tribals,
comes down on their heads.
The paradox of the counter-tribals is that they too are a tribe. Much as the
post-tribals were. The very act of opposing tribalism creates its own tribe.
This can be illustrated by an example from Howard Jacobson's novel, The
Finkler Question, in which the ASHamed Jews, who have formed a movement based
on their great shame at being identified with Israel, the epitome of Jewish
tribalism, find themselves becoming a tribe, bonding over their common
distaste for Jewish tribalism.
The paradox is one of human nature. The creation of a group is the birth of
an embryonic tribe. The post-tribal is only another form of tribe. The
counter-tribals understand this better than the post-tribals do. They just rarely
talk about it. They form a defined elite with consistent characteristics
whose existence they are constantly apologizing for at someone else's
expense. This too is a common feature of post-tribalism. The individual can
subsume his ego within the tribe, but the post-tribal associations are
collections of egos, plans for the imposition of collective mandates that
none of the individuals imposing them wishes to accept.
The post-tribal apocalypse is military as the clashes between construct
empires reached a devastating scope, while the counter-tribal apocalypse is
industrial. The counter-tribals reach back to romantic times, their obsession
with the evils of technology predates the moderns. The post-tribals may have
feared a nuclear war unleashed by mechanical means and mechanical societies
too detached from any sense of the group to understand that they were
destroying the world, but the counter-tribals are obsessed with industrial
pollution destroying the world, they project local pollution on a global
scale.
The post-tribal solution to nuclear war was typically more post-tribalism,
more transnationalism, more global organizations and international law,
eventually leading to a world state; the ultimate post-tribal institution.
The counter-tribal solution to a hallucinated environmental catastrophe is to
achieve what their feudal spiritual ancestors were unable to, the close
regulation of technology.
The post-tribals were obsessed with the new, while the counter-tribals are
obsessed with the real and the authentic. Apple is post-tribal, Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States is counter-tribal while Hip-Hop is
tribal. Combined them in one and you have an example of how post-tribal
structure makes counter-tribal and tribal ideas expressible and influential.
Modern America runs on post-tribal structures, but the spirit of its liberal
politics is the counter-tribalism and reservation tribalism of the left.
Counter-tribal and tribal politicians still use post-tribal rhetoric because
it is the only form of unity keeping countries together. They know that as
soon as the system fully engages in open counter-tribal and tribal rhetoric,
the entire thing will collapse.
America
still has the gloss of post-tribal technology and ideas, but underneath it is
the counter-tribal rot. And that counter-tribalism was paradoxically nurtured
by the post-tribal Soviet Union, which reverted from Communist industrial
post-tribalism to nationalistic romantic tribalism. Socialism's embrace of
industry had temporarily broken the romantic obsessions of the left, but did
not last. The elites always had a weakness for counter-tribalism because it
allowed their egos to triumph over any sense of national or tribal origins.
And egotism and its accompanying insecurity had their day.
Counter-tribalism perverts post-tribalism and yet it is also the natural
outcome of post-tribalism. The expansion of boundaries eventually leads to
the collapse of boundaries and the search for boundaries. The certainty that
we live in a material universe with no need for taboos or higher powers
eventually ends in the manufacture of taboos and apocalypses, a new grammar
of post-rational superstitions and fears of the self. The destruction of the
tribe and its certainties leads to the construction of new tribes based on
that mingled sense of superiority and inferiority that characterizes the
modern neurotic.
The counter-tribal is escaping the future and the past by running toward a
jumbled amalgam of both, forever seeking a reality and authenticity of
experience that he cannot find within his own self. He is driven to expose
and destroy, to avert some greater apocalypse that he senses is coming. The
post-tribal believed that man would rule the universe, but the counter-tribal
is possessed of the certainty that man is a bug on a windshield. The
counter-tribal, like the tribal,fears the future.
Tangled in his own sense of unreality, he flees the past for the future and the
future for the past, seeking a spirit guide of the Other to guide him out of
the urban mazes of New York, San Francisco and London back to the natural
realm of the real.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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