Now then: what has this
Ma tovu ohalecha Ya’akov,
Mish’k'no’techa Yisrael.
got to do with this?
Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.
City!, City!, City!
I’m sure you’re way ahead of me – the first quote is, as you’ll have recognized instantly, the verse of the song On The Ball, City sung by the entire congregation assemblage of Norwich City supporters before each home game at Carrow Road. I was amazed to learn that the song is extremely old, possibly antedating the club itself.
The second quote, which translates into English as ‘Excuse me Madam but does this bus go to the station How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, how beautiful your dwelling places, O Israel’, or some such of like fashion, is sung to a rousing tune, by way of throat-clearance, by congregants fans at the beginning of a Sabbath morning service in a synagogue.
So much for the identities of these songs – what have they got in common? Nothing much, you might think. One of them is in Hebrew, and the other isn’t. One is sung in a place of worship … Oh, all right, both of them are. What they have in common is this – they are communal signals given by individual participants to indicate subsumation into a larger group [did you really write that phrase? You did? It's crap. Just sayin' - Ed]. This is often emphasized by common articles of dress. Synagogue worshippers habitually wear very expensive yet somehow rather scratchy yellow and green leisurewear, with numbers on the back, while Canaries fans, if male, wear skullcaps and prayer shawls with tassels on the end.
But wait, there’s more.
Delegates at Labour Party conferences address one another as ‘Comrade’, wear red rosettes and sing the Internationale (I have all this on good authority from Mrs Crox, who has been to a couple of these shindigs). Chapters of the Womens’ Institute start their meetings by singing Jerusalem before smearing one another in home-made jam.
It’s all, I submit, reflective of a common urge, to be tribal. This came home to me five or six years ago when I read a book called Us and Them by David Berreby – a book that goes into the reasons for the tribal impulse, and perhaps the most fascinating book on the human condition I have ever read. If you haven’t read it – I strongly recommend that you leave this blog now and seek it out.
I took two messages from this book. The first is that tribalism needn’t have very deep roots. Experiments in which groups of people are randomly assigned to teams (the ‘reds’ and the ‘blues’, say) and then made to compete with each other, soon form collective identities, and, not much later, mythologies whereby their own group is exalted and the other, demonized. Family ties nor even much commonality of any other experience need have anything to do with it. Tribal attitudes happen spontaneously, whether in a nation or a knitting circle, a parent-teacher association or a corporation.
The second message related to my own Judaism. Before reading Us and Them I had a hard time explaining this to others. Is Jewishness a statement of ethnicity? Well, yes, in that it has rather strict rules about who is a Jew, who isn’t, proscriptions on intermarriage and so on. But, on the other hand, no – there are Jews of every skin colour, from lily white to deepest black, and, confusingly, whereas the ethnicity of Jews is discernible genetically, they are also genetically close to the societies in which they find themselves. But is Jewishness a religion? Well, yes, plainly. But as Jonathan Freedland explains in his book Jacob’s Gift, it is perfectly possible – even entirely reasonable – to be an atheist as well as a practicing Jew, and as we all know, practice makes perfect. Such a stance is just about inconceivable in Islam or Christianity. If Judaism is a religion, it’s a very odd one.
All such difficulties are swept away once one considers Judaism as tribal – an in-group with its own codes of dress, of language, of ways of doing things. But once you go that far, then practically every group activity is tribal.
A typical tribal response is to launch salvoes of complaint if the tribe perceives itself as under attack. I’ve done this myself – I too am human – but I have encountered some telling examples in my capacity as the editor of Futures, the weekly SF stream at Your Favourite etcetera etcetera. A story we published that poked gentle fun at transubstantiation provoked an irate response – which was as nothing to the high-fiving d00dsplaining douchebaggery that spewed forth from a well-known Minnesota blogevangelist when we published a story which (in the tribal mind) imagined a society in which militant atheism ruled the roost and expunged belief by force. Quite apart from the failure of all concerned to understand that the views expressed by characters in stories need have nothing to do with the views of the author, or the editor, never mind that these views have every right to be held, one could, as if at the wrong end of the telescope, see nothing more than two tribes, neither more or less equal to the other.
And, what the heck, these are just stories – whether SF; the tale we’ve just celebrated in which angels of death pass over the houses of the Israelites, looking for Egyptians to smite with plagues of lawnmowers and all-you-can-eat KFC bargain buckets; the one I saw described recently as the cult in which adherents symbolically consume the flesh and blood of their own maimed and tortured God; notwithstanding inasmuch as which the spectacle from which adherents derive almost ecstatic satisfaction from a ritual, with its arcane rules comprehensible only to Level-Five Operating Thetans initiates – the Offside Rule, anyone? - in which young men kick a ball round a field. It’s tribal. And despite the efforts of churchmen and He Who Must Not Be Named alike to urge us to transcend this corporeal estate, we cannot help it – it’s only human.
I’d make the secret sign but you can’t see it on the radio. Hallo Henry. Much more than in my youth I’ll leap to the defense of Us, entirely because it turns out my grandma was right and there is in fact a very large Them which regards itself as an Us, and which on occasion turns to massacring um Us. The Us I’m interested in, I mean, the one with Me and the Small Girl in it. And you too, of course.
I can’t say I’m convinced that the yelling actually works, but seeing as how no one’s stopped me from going about my business in the last 40+ years, I’ll take it on faith that yelling is good for the Jews. Were the opposing Us peaceable about the whole business, I’m sure I’d content myself with bitching about other Jews.
The SG had her introduction to antisemitism a couple nights ago, courtesy of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Kid wanted to know why the token bigot on the show didn’t like Rhoda just because she was Jewish, so I tucked the kid in and explained about how things used to be, and in fact still are, here and there, even in this country. Told her about the blood of Christ (“But that’s not true! They should ask somebody!”) and a bit more about Hitler, told her about why I give money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and about why the Israeli doc is so vehement at every kiddush, and a bit more than that. She got very pink and said, “_Well_, those people should stop and _think_ a little bit about how they’d feel if someone said things that weren’t true about _them_, or — or — if people didn’t like _them_ just because of how they were _born_ –” and pretended she wasn’t crying.
It wasn’t a nice conversation, and there are only two good things I can see coming from it: One, that she’s begun to think about a thing that’s real and that may come to bear directly on her life someday; and two, that she has a much deeper appreciation of people like Miep and her family, who ignore Us and Them even when the stakes are very high.
Thanks for that Amy – when we lived in London, antisemitism was knowing and ubiquitous. Everyone kvetched about the Far Right, but more worrying by far were the more insidious threats posed by Radical Islam and the Far Left, especially after the Iraq War started. In North Norfolk, though, antisemitism is driven by ignorance, especially among the Lower Orders. Crox Minima has seen none of it at her very middle-class-boho primary school, but Crox Minor’s rather rough high school is full of oiks doing Nazi salutes at her – the said oiks having no idea what they are doing. Crox Minor recently asked a passing 9-year-old what she knew about Jews, and the reply was telling – Jews are people that other people hate. That was her definition of Jews, a people defined by the hatred of others. Whew.
Why does it happen? A perhaps scientific control experiment suggests that the wider collectivity is simply jealous. In Kenya, I learned when I was there, the Kikuyu tribe provides lawyers, doctors and intellectuals out of all proportion to its size. And is consequently loathed by all the other tribes. QED.
Very interesting post…It is sad that the ‘tribal’ urge begins so early in life…
I love collective mind-think. In some ways.
This being an example – I had just been thinking about tribalism. Why? Because of a link that Bora Z – Coturnix to some – had posted to a guest blog at Scientific American that I had seen on Facebook the other day. I read it, nodded my head a good deal. But then before I posted the link, I had a thought about – would anyone else reading this learn anything they didn’t know? Probably not. And the comments were pretty justified (cf mackenzie2148). So, rather than to be taken as espousing the rather superficial essay whole-heartedly, I didn’t pass it on. But here it is. The cultural cognition discipline takes its root in that self-same tribalism.
Anyhow, as one of those atheist Jews (self-identified, but permitted by the tribe, since Mom was a self-identified Unitarian Universalist born Jew), I appreciate having the words now to explain to others what my connection is with this group of people and its history. Came about 15 years too late for the inlaws but it’ll likely come up again. Good post, Henry.
My secondary point being that it would be silly to deny the deep-rooted, atavistic desire (need?) to be part of a tribe. Look at me above: I belong to these tribes of bloggers, of intellectuals, of Facebook-frequenters, of like-believers, of like-cultural-heritage-transmitters. And it makes me feel like I belong somewhere and am rooted. Better to recognize it in oneself.
I didn’t preview and therefore, my link to cultural cognition was faulty. I hope to have rectified it, now.
Thanks for these, Heather. In his book, David Berreby goes into the phenomenon in which one can be a member of many tribes simultaneously. I’m a Jew, a blues musician, a parent, a motorist (and more than that, a Volvo driver), a supporter of Norwich City, a beachcomber, a dog walker – as well as a blogger (with Us rather than Them) and so on. Sure, it’s deep-rooted and atavistic – the tribal urge takes over very quickly, once it starts.
That’s quite a story, Henry, and a sobering one.
I do wonder if this atavistic urge you speak of isn’t a heavily-gendered one. In general I don’t see that women try to organize themselves into tribes; again, my daycare habitat says that the boys will run around in packs, but the girls organize themselves into huddles of three-to-five, which allows for games of exclusion. Five’s big for those bunches, too; three or four is more common. The exclusionary games aren’t about us v. them; they’re about us v. her, and are exercises in power-wielding, whetstones for the sort of social coercion-negotiating women do their entire lives. Having come out the other side on the mother end, I see that the women’s friend-groups are organized as mutual-aid societies, and for very practical reasons: the women are raising children, running homes, and manipulating/steering husbands on fairly limited resources, financial, psychological, timewise. Even if the women’s families have money, and even if the women have careers, in general, the husbands are the serious moneymakers. All that mean-girl practice comes in very handy then: the women have learned how to apply pressure (and learned why to do it) without being horrible to each other, just as the men have learned, by midlife, not to run around killing the hell out of each other. Although in both cases the knowhow remains.
I am not so sure that the women’s groups are about identity, though. There’s a palpable sense of sisterhood, yes, but I think the primary sense of identity derives from self and family, which is perhaps why, in general, women seem to do so much better than men do after divorce or the death of a spouse; they’re DIY with the household-generating, and really only need a handful of good friends, who needn’t know each other. What I have seen is serious trouble for men if they can’t find their way into some pack or other. At a minimum they drive their wives insane.
This is all descriptive, btw, of things I’ve seen, and is in no sense meant to be professional anthropology, which I’m sure is best.
I’m sure you’re right – that group behaviour is strongly modulated by gender. I don’t think Berreby gets into that into his book, as sexual competition (a very rich field in evolutionary biology) is a big discussion all on its own.
Incidentally, Henry, I’ve found the fraternity-initiation aspect of the liturgy and rituals annoying as hell since starting again to go to shul regularly, oh, eight years ago. I mean that’s obviously the purpose of so much of it. Even all this kitniyot/chametz nonsense: the whole object is to separate oneself from the rest of the world and define Us ever more sharply — all these obsessive rituals of kashrut. I’ve been sitting here with a house full of chametz all week, and the urge to eat bread instead of matzah? Nonexistent. But no, the ortho want you to do a whole hue and cry with feathers and candles and blah blah blah sell your chametz to a goy. Make a big deal. We Are Kosher For Passover. Same with the expansion of “chametz” to rice, beans, etc. (I tossed that whole business out the window; the first person who shows me that chickpeas are yeast-leavened will sell me on that nonsense again). And all the davening that reduces to “Us! Us! Us!” Meh.
I wondered a while back: Why do it at all, if the male tribalism’s offends? And the answer is that that’s not all there is to it. Yes, there’s a thrill in male voices singing by the hundreds. But it’s also about love: growing up wrapped in a grandfather’s tallis, your mother’s voice and loveliness as she lights candles and sings a bedtime Sh’ma, the dining-room hilarity of a Chad Gadya, all these things. I find that the song is what binds me, a song that carries with it a rhetoric and a cast of mind and a role in the human comedy.
I agree completely. Mrs Crox might not, though, as she has the zeal of a convert.
As an agnostic atheist wind-up artist, I’m sorely tempted to say “Tell that to the Bishops in the C of E”, Henry.
And wasn’t it essentially how Martin Rees was characterising himself the other week, amid all the kerfuffle about his accepting the Templeton Prize?
I did hear a somewhat wry apothegm on the difference between Anglicanism and Catholicism. In Anglicanism, the congregation is atheist whereas the priest is a believer. In Catholicism, it’s the other way round.
I always feel an outsider, not part of the majority tribe. I’m not sure whether this is a result of being gay, or a cause of it. I would need many more hours of therapy to figure that out.
Paradoxically, I did feel some tribal connection to the alternative, gay culture even before I knew I was gay. And even though that gay culture sometimes seems a bit extreme, I do support, for example, Peter Tatchell and I admire his unwavering determination to protest against prejudice.
Knowing that people ‘out there’ hate you and what you represent does make you more radical in wanting to stand up and be counted.
I felt very much the same way, Frank, when the Iraq War brought a lot of simmering antisemitism to the surface. I became much more aware of my own Jewish identity than I had been, and was moved to stand up for it.
From Austin’s link, it sure looks like he’s right. Martin Rees certainly seems to practice the same kind of cultural religion that I do, even if the accoutrements are different.
Frank, you must have noticed that outsiders always pay much more attention to tribal attributes than the ones who can take for granted their inclusion in a tribe that will protect their interests. Either to study said attributes to better emulate, or to better reject them.
I had to come back to this and mention how “dans l’air du temps” Henry has been – check out item number 3 on this list! “Tribal” is clearly the new black among
the intelligentsiathe eliteUS to explain otherwise irrational behavior.May I add ‘trendsetter’ to ‘Celebrity Nutritionist’ in my masthead?
What about “maven”?
As in ‘davening raven’?
I had only heard of the davening parrot but perhaps they are of the same avian tribe.
The Tribe of Douchebag is unfortunately quite a large and international one.
My undergrad university places each incoming freshman into a residential college (at random, unless one is a Legacy), which is meant to be your social group and tribe. The tribe identity for a given college persists long after one has graduated. There are usually 8-12 graduates of this university in each year’s incoming class of medical students, and of course that in itself puts them in a tribe with me. But if they were also in Ravenclaw College, as I was, then there’s an additional level of tribalism, with accompanying legends, lore, secret handshakes, cryptic references, etc. I’m repeatedly surprised at how well-entrenched it remains in me after lo-all-these-many-years-on, especially since it was just 4 years of my life.
I don’t think the Tribe of Douchebag is really a tribe, rather a kind of collection of otherwise disconnected objects that resemble one another in certain qualities, rather in the manner of dog turds.
You’re probably right – they’re scattered across the Great Lawn of the Blogosphere, until some responsible soul comes and picks them up with an inverted plastic bag.
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