Monday 9 November 2009

Tribalism, nationalism and peaceful co-existence

I'm not an anthropologist, but it's easy to see what tribalism had going for it. The evolution of unique customs and a way of life gives the members of a tribe the sensation of being special and, given the competitive nature of humanity, this will probably come to translate as a sense of superiority to one's neighbours. This too can be useful, since it gives you an excuse to invade them with impunity and take their stuff.

In these terms, nationalism seems to me to work best the more homogeneous in some clearly identifiable way is the group comprising a nation. If it starts to lose a common religion, ethnicity, culture, values, or whatever is the cement that confers a sense of nationhood, a nation may be in trouble.

Something which may be said in favour of empires is that they can maintain peace and prosperity in tribally disparate areas. An overall structure, civil service, law inforcement, transport ETC, imposed from the centre and ultimately administered by those other than native inhabitants with their own particular allegiances, can create some semblance of national unity. The imperial master can also be the focus for everyone's resentment, creating a common focus, so that the imperialists can replace the neighbouring tribe as the most immediate "them" as opposed to "us". When the empire is defeated or dismantled, it may turn out that your country is just a bunch of lines that someone else drew on a map. At that point, unless you have a charismatic ring master like Martial Tito cracking the whip, all hell may break loose as old tribal/ethnic enmities reassert themselves.

The more successful nation states managed to throw off their internal tribal divisions. Maybe that's why they so recklessly ignored them as a fragmenting force when withdrawing from their former dominions. But even for the more succesful nations, I fear that nationalism, like tribalism, may have passed its sell by date. Within our national frontiers and internationally, I think the major threat is not cultural, but economic. If we value our cultures, we must address the economic failings built into our current system, to avoid catastrophe in the medium to long term.

Internally, those of us who live in more affluent countries live in economies which can only sustain growth by bombarding all our citizens with consumerist goals they cannot possibly attain without running up unsustainable debt. In this way, the internal consensus which makes nations governable is under growing threat. Externally, those denied this consumer paradise, and facing much more basic food and water shortages at home, will be trying to get in. If we don't let them, we should not be surprised by a rising tide of resentment, remembering that hungry people will stop at nothing to feed themselves and their families. Do we want to live in affluent fortresses?

Perhaps simplistically, it seems to me that we have to divert our technological expertise from making consumer goods which nobody really needs into making more of this world habitable and productive for it people. This is not an ideological agenda. Apart from any ethical or moral imperatives which we may embrace as part of our personal belifs, there are imperatives of enlightened self-interest which, if we ignore them, may see any quality of life we have destroyed by the besieging hordes of the dispossessed.

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