I have mentioned that one of my two major projects for 2021 is an extended reflection on one of America’s most critical needs, “Transcending Tribalism.” Our divisions are profound. While some placed hope in the potential for healing in the results of the 2020 Presidential election, it is abundantly clear that no such moment of national unity has materialized. Sadly, we are as divided as ever.
In fact, the chasm separating us into “tribes” is at least decades old, and has been widening over time. Attempting to address the issue is itself fraught with danger, as I recognize that I’m personally a member of one of the tribes – let’s call it the Blues – and dealing with the division carries with it the temptation of moving (unfairly) in the direction of self-justification. Such an approach would be, practically by definition, counter-productive.
The temptation is particularly strong in light of the loyalty of the Reds (in the contemporary, not the 20th century communist sense) to a personality whose administration began with an assertion of “alternative facts” and then ended with a tweet to refuse certification of electoral college votes pending acceptance of “corrected facts” on January 6th.
Two quotes seem pertinent to me. One is attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But, even so, I will need to keep in mind Oscar Wilde’s trenchant remark in the 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan, “I can resist anything except temptation.” The temptation to make the tribal division a matter of moral black and white, over and above the political Red and Blue, is too destructive to succumb to, in my judgment.
But there’s another danger to be concerned about, and that is the glossing over of standards that would then simply yield to false equivalencies.
History, both here in the US and around the world, is replete with examples of societies riven by faction. In most, this has devolved into a raw power struggle. Under those circumstances, it is all too easy to see “might makes right” as the outcome, rationalized as it so often is by the adage “history is written by the victors,” an aphorism going back at least into the 19th century.
In all humility, I aspire to do better than that.
I am heartened by the efforts of those, like Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela abroad and domestic figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and John Lewis, who sought courageously to redress divisions while adhering in a disciplined way to higher principles. If their success was only partial, that seems to me to be the
human condition. The inability to achieve a goal absolutely in a world of contingency, change, and choice should not inhibit attempts at making things better from here on out.
A critical lesson I take from such figures is the idea of loving engagement, which in turn is a principle of restorative justice. Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha (truth plus firmness) included a conviction that in nonviolent confrontation with an opponent one is taking care of the adversary’s soul, an act of love. I dare say that is hardly a consideration in today’s battle of tribes.
And yet it has been an effective approach – not perfect, but notably practicable – when hostility has proven fruitless in bringing a resolution to division. That is my primary clue in pursuing “transcendence” as a path, rather than “strategic victory.”
To add to the well-known leaders already mentioned, let’s remember the process and the structure that led to and took shape in the Good Friday Accords or the Belfast Agreement resolving ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, led by Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar, and Baroness May Blood who represented Northern Ireland at Westminster from 1999 through 2018, played a catalytic role in going beyond the sectarian violence to establish a new institutional relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the sovereign state of Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom.
The strength of the new relationship was tested, and proven, in the turmoil of Brexit, when the re-establishment of a ‘hard border’ between North and South became a deal-breaker in negotiating the UK’s departure from the European Union. The determination to retain the hard-won reconciliation of the Good Friday Agreement is a strong case-in-point for a commitment to a “transcending” value that bridges the separate interests of two opposing parties.
On a larger scale, the European Union itself is testament to how the seemingly improbable can be brought to pass. After the Second World War, Europe was devastated and suffered not only the physical damage of “total war” but the animosity remaining between the combatant nations. A “tribal” resolution by the victors – which was the short-sighted approach of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I – could easily have set the stage for a renewed phase of hostility, this time a ‘hot war’ between East and West, the Soviet Bloc (the Warsaw Pact) and the forces led by the U.S. and others in the Atlantic Alliance (NATO).
The key to an alternative path was a transnational effort – with the stunning support of the Marshall Plan – to rebuild Europe on a continental basis, with Germany and Italy of the Axis powers as partners with Great Britain, France, and other former Allied adversaries in arms. Again, not a perfect resolution, but one that has avoided war on the continent for three-quarters of a century.
In my “Transcending Tribalism” project, I am going to begin with the thinkers before moving on to the doers. I believe that if we can’t agree on fundamental facts, that is a problem that needs to be addressed before we can even consider a transcending politics. Of course, thinking and doing are not opposed. A theory that cannot be practically applied is really not much of a theory, after all. And action that has no overarching concept behind it has as much chance of hitting its target as an unguided missile.
So, my initial installment in the “Transcending Tribalism” series can be found on the Philosophy and Theology page of the website at “www.hughfkelly.com/philosophyandtheology/tribalism1” Your reactions and comments will be valuable as I proceed with this series.