Us vs Me
Sometimes it feels like we’re living through an us-vs-them Twilight Zone episode. National populism has reared its ugly head around the world. US politics is increasingly defined by polarized choices — Democrat vs Republican, Conservative vs Progressive, Rural vs Urban, Have vs Have-Not. It seems as if we are collectively reverting to our clannish tribal instincts.
By 50,000 years ago, humans were the last hominids standing (so to speak), organized in hunter-gatherer clans. These groups are believed to have been comprised of only a few dozens of people, limited either by nutritional availability or by brain size (Dunbar’s number, often quoted as ~150). Clans likely interacted with each other, but there was no need for large settlements to survive in our sparsely populated world.
Then, around 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution began transforming humankind’s hunter-gatherer existence into one based on agriculture. By 5000 years ago, massive civilizations were developing around the world — with large settlements, powerful rulers, armies, and even bureaucracies. All of this was necessary to defend and manage the complex organizational challenges of maintaining and defending civilization. Human populations flourished and the world became less sparsely populated.
The world is now largely organized as a collection of nation states. Though clan structures continue to exist within many nation states, they are far less prevalent in Western liberal democracies, whose governance structures grew out of ideas advanced during the Enlightenment (roughly the 18th century). Enlightenment ideas led to governments that embraced democratic institutions, individual rights, and natural equality.
Clan structures are very different. Mark Weiner, in his book The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, points out that clans are built primarily around extended kinship relationships and tend to grow and flourish when a nation state is weak (e.g., Afghanistan). Not too surprisingly, criminal gangs and international crime syndicates operate much like clans and for much the same reasons. Humans seem to naturally devolve into clan organizational structures. They are, after all, similar to how our closest primate cousins organize themselves. They’re sometimes consensus driven but not democratic.
In clan societies, independent individual action is subservient to the needs of the clan. Modern liberal societies are, at least theoretically, organized differently. The purpose of the liberal state is to ensure and protect independent individual action (see, for example, the US Declaration of Independence). The Western liberal state strives (at least to a point and even though it sometimes fails) to protect individual action from being overly subverted by governmental action.
We humans, especially those of us who live in Western countries, value our freedom to act individually. We love that we have great leeway to live where we wish, travel as we wish, dress how we wish, marry who we wish, work in careers of our choosing, worship as we wish, participate in civic organizations of our choosing, buy what we wish, and live lives mostly of our own choosing. The wide ranges of choice we enjoy would make even the richest of our ancestors envious.
But as we all know, restrictions still apply. Finances and other resources constrain choices. A significant portion of our income is appropriated through taxation. Laws enacted by our representatives (many of whom we didn’t vote for) require adherence. And we shouldn’t forget those restrictions that we voluntarily accept, such as those required by families and other intimate relationships. Even working with our favored civic and social organizations often requires putting aside or compromising personal needs and desires.
Almost daily we come face to face with the inherent conflict created by Enlightenment ideals. As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently recognized:
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
By-and-large, we go along with restrictions because, as with other primates who share our evolutionary past, we’re social animals. Group cooperation is in our DNA. It’s how we survived and flourished as a species. As Jonathan Haidt puts it in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:
Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship …
Of course, we also cooperated with each other even in our clannish past. It’s just that we we’ve gone from around 150 people as us to over 300 million people — over 300 million people with different ideas about right and wrong, about where Jefferson’s limits begin, about fairness, about how to live our lives, even about what it means to cooperate.
Sebastian Junger, in his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, suggests that we are mentally and socially healthier when we feel closely connected to our tribe. He presents compelling evidence that being a little cog in a big wheel just doesn’t cut it. We may be suffering from the kind of society that came out of those Enlightenment ideals.
But I’m not prepared to totally subvert me to us. I love my freedoms and my choices. On the other hand, I recognize that I also need us for the safety of me and the ones I love. I want the cooperative benefits of us that provide those amazingly rich choices that I cherish. And, to Junger’s point, I want the camaraderie and sense of belonging that comes with us.
The idea behind Western liberal governance was that a bottoms-up approach was preferable to tops-down. We wished to have governments that are responsive to the collective will of the governed — not that the governed should be responsive to the will of the governing.
But it is easy for the collective will of the governed to become a tyranny of the majority, a tyranny that can be very much as real as the authoritarian kind (which even democracies are prone to). We shouldn’t forget that in our Republic, at one time slavery was legal, women’s suffrage was illegal, same-sex relationships were illegal … the list goes on.
So, exactly where should the rights of me appropriately be subverted to the demands of us? What decisions are best done by the collective, and what decisions are best made by individuals? What level of taxation is too much? How much control of what I eat, drink, or smoke is too much? What hateful words should I be allowed to utter?
Unfortunately, the answer to these questions lie very much in the eye the beholder. Baby-bear positions are not universal. But if we could somehow manage to find the Overton window for discussing our most pressing us vs. me questions, perhaps we could get away from those us vs. them debates that seem to be driving us apart.
We need to figure out what can get us out of our retrograde tribal behavior and back into the promise of those Enlightenment ideals.
