Remake or Replace Tribes

Tribes contain factions. Tribe members mostly interact with and emulate other members of their same tribe, while faction members do these things more often with members of other factions. Tribes tend to have distinct moral norms and status markers, while factions tend to share the norms and status markers of their tribe. Factions often differ on status, income, professions, and on symbolic markers like food, clothes, languages, holidays, and artistic styles. Factions also often disagree on directions to change shared tribe policies and norms. The distinction between tribes and factions is a matter of degree.

Our dominant world culture hates tribes, but loves factions, especially factions who we see as “down”. We hate groups who disagree with world elite consensus on school, medicine, democracy, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, rules of just war, and norms of good parenting. And we hate tribe supporters for their self-favoritism and habitual hostility toward outsiders. About these things we see our dominant world tribe as just right, and the others evil.

But we love factions within this main tribe who embrace distinct symbols, and who fight for tribe norm reforms. We call this love “tolerance”. At least we love factions who we can plausibly see as “down” relative to “up” rivals. (We presume “up” illicitly hurts “down”.) We hate “up” faction members who promote their factions, and accuse them of actually representing hated tribes. We moderns tend to channel our instinctive human tendencies to be tribal into our factional conflicts. Not noticing how we need tribes far more than factions.

The big problem is that in history our moral norms and status markers came mostly from cultural group selection acting on tribes, not factions. By crushing all but one dominant tribe, we now mostly block such evolution from preventing the decay of shared norms, or their adaption to changing context. We now see this most clearly in the decay of norms supporting fertility, but such decay is plausibly also happening across all our key norms. Selection acting instead on factions can’t do this remotely as well. If such decay continues long, our civilization will fall, to be replaced by others.

Unfortunately, we find it hard to see this problem, as our moral norms and status markers seem to us as just obviously true, and thus good bases for any analysis. In contrast, we can see and appreciate fights among factions, as we can frame these in terms of our “obvious” shared norms. But that doesn’t help much to ensure that the winners of faction fights are more adaptive.

Instead of trying to repress competing tribes, as we usually do, we might try to instead promote them. But even that seems quite insufficient, as the main underlying reason that the world has over centuries been merging toward one big tribe is the increasing ease of distant trade, travel, and talk. Such merging has achieved great scale economies of production and innovation, and a great reduction in conflict harms, such as via war, due to increasingly shared norms. Most people really like having a world community with shared norms..

There are a few today, like the Amish and Haredim, who care enough to treat themselves as distinct tribes, and are willing to forgo many gains of world cultural integration to achieve this. Such folks insulate themselves culturally from the large world, and so are the folks today whose descendants are mostly likely to replace our dominant world culture. But few groups today are this devoted to becoming tribes. Most of the folks today interested in cultural variety, like “network state” folks, are not remotely this devoted, and so have little chance of creating new tribes.

I can see only three ways for our main world civ, which I treasure in many ways, to avoid being replaced like this. The first solution is to somehow greatly raise the status of tribes, relative to factions. Convince the world to fragment into far more tribes, not just factions. Tolerate and even encourage groups having quite deviant views on democracy, gender equality, etc. to favor themselves and isolate from outsiders.

The second solution is to leave the world mostly integrated into one big tribe, but to find new ways to control and govern how key moral norms and status markers are changed to become more adaptive. Such as via competent governments held strongly accountable to increase adaption futures estimates, or via using a competent futarchy to pursue sacred adaption-achieving goals like when a million people live in space.

The third solution is to vastly increase the role of for-profit orgs in setting our moral norms and status markers. The evolution of firm cultures has long been quite healthy, as firms form quite distinct groups facing strong capitalists selection pressures. And for-profit orgs competing to give customers key numbers and observable outcomes have quite consistently improved on such outcomes. Each area they came to control, such as buying and running governments, or paying parents to make kids they could in effect sell, would likely become more adaptive.

As you can plainly see, these are all big long-shots. Our situation is quite desperate. And not likely to get better until a lot more people start to think about it.