Why Are We More Divided Than Ever? - Michael Morris

Why does tribalism exist? Why, why did it evolve?

Well, tribalism is what, uh, got us out of the Stone Age. It's what, uh, led to our human-specific form of social life, which is different from the social life of other social species, including our cousins, the chimpanzees. Um, they live in minimally collaborative troops that can never get larger than about 50 individuals, or they turn into a bloodbath. And we evolved, uh, some social quirks that enable us to live in culture sharing groups, and these culture sharing groups allow for a level of collaboration and, um, c- common fate and common concern that, that is not, uh, present in other, uh, in any other social species. And so tribes, uh, tribes are large groups united by shared culture, and our tribal instincts were, you know, adaptations or mutations that changed our psychology slightly to enable us to live in this kind of group, and it just turned out to be the ultimate killer app of evolution, because once we were in these culture sharing groups, uh, it snowballed. You know, the, the cultures started getting more complex and more adapted to the local ecology with each generation, and then humans, without becoming any brainier, were more capable of surviving and thriving because they could tap into these better cultures each generation, and they just left all the other species in their dust, you know, so that's the basic story about tribalism. And we're stuck with it because it's in our wiring.

(laughs)

You know, it doesn't always lead us to do the right thing, but, um, I still believe that it's mostly adaptive, that our tribal instincts enable us to do most of the things that we are proud of and that we benefit from. Uh, we notice it more when it leads us to do things that are dysfunctional, and certainly there are examples of that in the world today.

That, uh, so tribalism is predicated on culture, that without culture there can be no tribalism. Is that, is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, that's a fair way to say it, and that's not always, that's not always a prominent theme. I mean, most of the talk about tribalism is by the sort of political pundits, you know, and they're just kind of grasping for a catchall explanation to understand, you know, the red/blue rift, and the record racial protests, and religious conflicts, and, you know, it's, it's an easy, quite facile thing to say, you know. "Oh, it's our resurgent tribalism." You know, "Our tribal instincts have reappeared," you know, and, "We're, we're, uh, we're descending into tribalism and our democracy will never be the same." You know, that's, that's what we've been hearing, and I think it's a... I call it the trope of toxic tribalism, and it, it's, it's a pretty despairing theme because the idea is that somehow, somehow the genie got out of the bottle and there's no way to get it back inside again, and I don't, I don't really think that's what's going on. I think, you know, we have some bad conflicts in the world today, but that's true, that's true every generation. Every generation thinks they're presiding over the, the end times, you know. What's new is this, this way of talking about the conflicts as though they reflect some evolutionary curse, you know, some, some drive to hate other groups that is always going to be, you know, undermining us, and I, I don't think that's true. I think that the tribal instincts are, are, are instincts that evolution sculpted in order to help us be culture sharing animals, and, uh, that enabled us to live in very large, collaborative groups. And a side effect of those tribal instincts is that we sometimes get into conflicts with other groups, but, you know, the- they're not instincts for hostility. They're instincts for solidarity. Uh, all of our instincts will lead us astray in some situations. You know, we, we evolved, we evolved to be attracted to sweet tastes because, you know, fruit has a lot of nutrition. Now, if you live on a block with two donut shops, you know, that, that wiring might lead you to eat in an unhealthy way. It doesn't mean that it's an instinct for gluttony. Uh, it's an instinct for food, and if we understand that, we have a better way of coping with the problem than if we think that we're cursed with some flawed wiring, which is, you know, a way of thinking about human nature that is kind of attractive in a tragic way, you know, like there are-