It seems basically confused to imagine that we start with a bunch of individuals who might choose to get along in liberal society, and then some defect causes them to gratuitously engage in tribalism. Rather, humans are social animals who evolved to function well in groups with a lot of shared local information and norms, and liberal individualism is a comparatively unusual practice built on that substrate. If we want to sustain it outside its historical origins, we need to understand the social technologies necessary to support it.
This also means that it’s confused to try to “do tribalism” in a consumerist way, as one in a range of separate, more or less independent things you participate in. The norms of your community—and the vast majority of us are part of the global cosmopolitan liberal community, even the conservatives, neoreactionaries, and other such pseudo-old-fashioned weirdos among us—are how you come to be someone in particular in the first place. Tribal rituals and affiliations that don’t get integrated into the fabric of our way of life will die out as they go out of fashion. The others will change us. We should take care to change ourselves for the better.
It seems basically confused to imagine that we start with a bunch of individuals who might choose to get along in liberal society, and then some defect causes them to gratuitously engage in tribalism. Rather, humans are social animals who evolved to function well in groups with a lot of shared local information and norms, and liberal individualism is a comparatively unusual practice built on that substrate. If we want to sustain it outside its historical origins, we need to understand the social technologies necessary to support it.
This also means that it’s confused to try to “do tribalism” in a consumerist way, as one in a range of separate, more or less independent things you participate in. The norms of your community—and the vast majority of us are part of the global cosmopolitan liberal community, even the conservatives, neoreactionaries, and other such pseudo-old-fashioned weirdos among us—are how you come to be someone in particular in the first place. Tribal rituals and affiliations that don’t get integrated into the fabric of our way of life will die out as they go out of fashion. The others will change us. We should take care to change ourselves for the better.