Sebastian Junger: Tribe

“No Arts; no letters; no society and which is worst of all, continual fear, and the danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

Hobbes

“It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which by moderating the love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequity of Mankind, 1755

Rousseau

“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
Junger, p. xvii.

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, 2016

Junger

Junger TED Talk on PTSD

Most of us today tend to view a future without a society of law, order and the trappings civilization in a dystopian sense.  In the Cold War, this future was viewed through the lens of a potential nuclear holocaust.  In modern times, preppers stock up on ammunition, weapons, and food for the time that an Electro-Magnetic Pulse turns out the lights and unleashes Hobbesian anarchy.  In popular culture, some futuristic disease turns the vast majority of the population into walking dead, with the remaining humans killing each other for dwindling resources.  Sebastian Junger disagrees with Hobbes and sides with Rousseau highlighting positive qualities to the human essence.  To find this, Junger travels to some of the worst places people can go, war and natural disasters.  In the maelstrom of war and the destruction of earthquakes, he finds compassion and self-sacrifice.  Junger argues that the suppression of these positive natural traits by modern society causes all sorts of problems from mental illness and long term PTSD to political fissures ripping the country apart.  In a unique approach, Junger couples his own experiences with war as a journalist and couples this with a brief historical review of the early American experience of western civilization colliding with American Indians in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.  By becoming aware of these beneficial qualities of our shared human nature, Junger points the way to a strong, natural and emotional component to a universal cosmopolitan identity envisioned by modern philosophers. 

“Humans are so strongly wired to help one another-and enjoy such enormous social benefits from doing so-that people regularly risk their lives for complete strangers.”
Junger, p 55.

           

Junger devotes a great deal of his book to analyzing how humans react to man-made and natural disasters; from earthquakes which wipe out small cities, to British and German civilian reactions to the bombing in the Second World War.  In particular, he reviews the work of American scientist Charles E. Fritz who studied the after-effects of such disasters.  During the height of the Cold War, research such as this was particularly interesting since the possibility of the instantaneous destruction of civilization was real.  Fritz didn’t find any evidence that communities experiencing grave calamites lapsed into anything approaching a Hobbesian state of nature.   Fritz proposed a broad theory of social resilience to explain this apparent cohesion under the most extreme conditions.  Disasters appeared to thrust people back in time into a more “ancient, organic way of relating” creating what Fritz coined a “community of sufferers.”  In the same way that combat strips away manufactured identities, these disasters brought people together, each bringing their unique talents to try to alleviate suffering and to provide basic needs.  Modern society and technology have eliminated this threat from most of us and Junger counts that as an incalculable blessing.  However, the same civilization that protects us from the trials that until recently plagued mankind daily, denies us that basic human urge to help and interact with other people in such a direct and positive way.

“But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty and selfishness than can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.”
Junger, p. 77.

            Outside the immediate family, even though surrounded by sometimes thousands of people, many of us live very solitary lives.  It is this disconnectedness with our fellow humans that Junger proposes is a key reason that many combat and even non-combat veterans have a difficult time returning to modern life.  Having experienced intense human relationships on the edge of life and death devoid of class, racial or political distinctions, returning to an individualistic self-centered society plagued by divisions is particularly depressing.  In the early history of the United States, there was an alternative.  Eventually, this alternative disappeared, overwhelmed by modernity and banished to the reservations.  We don’t usually think of colonial America as plagued with modern problems however, some people at that time did.  When presented with the alternative of a more primitive tribal existence either by choice or by captivity many stayed with their new tribal families.  Junger cites examples of early American thinkers perplexed by stories of freed White captives of Indian raids not wanting to return home and of men wandering off into the wilderness to join Indian tribes, abandoning their families.  In addition, given the choice, Indian captives always seemed to return home.  Just like the intoxicating human experiences of war that are so hard to reconcile with modern America, Junger argues that some Americans two centuries ago found the similar experiences of tribal life too attractive.  An egalitarian, simple existence devoid of class and little distinctions and chocked full of base human experiences was, to some, irresistible compared to a dull Puritan existence. 

            Junger describes two behaviors that were critical for evolutionary success; the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense.  Junger argues that these behaviors were necessary in the tribal hunter-gatherer stage of the human experience and have hardly had the chance to evolve away in the ten thousand years or so since we started moving away from that existence.  Junger goes on to extrapolate that these two traits have gender characteristics of their own, however, they can and have been filled by either of the historical sexes.  These behaviors are so ingrained and essential that the effect of subverting or eliminating the need to exercise them is deadening to the human spirit.  Modern society, Junger argues, has done just that.   By eliminating the need to look after our fellow man, all of us to a greater or lesser extent have a hole in our humanness, an emptiness that some people spend a lifetime trying to fill. 
       
         Philosopher, Kwame Anthony Apiah in his book The Lies That Bind, calls humans the wise species because our brains are able to pick up and learn things from others that we would not be able to know independently.  Apiah shows that the many group identities that we regard as critical and essential are really inventions of the mind, some of them quite recent.  These divisions are artificial creations, and that with careful reasoning and thought can be eliminated or reduced in importance leaving only one true group identity, that of the human race.  Astrophysicist Carl Sagan likewise pointed out the absurdity of internal divisions among people when looked at from a cosmological perspective.  Both the philosopher and the cosmologist take a top-down, logical approach to promote a singular overarching cosmopolitan group identity.  By contrast, Junger, by looking men and women in the eye under fire or recalling what it was like under stress takes a bottom-up approach to our shared humanness.  Tribal society was no utopia.  Thomas Hobbes was probably more right than wrong when he compared the advantages of civilization to that of a tribal semi-anarchy.  However, Junger exposes a singular weakness of modern society in Tribe.  If Junger is correct, then by reconnecting with the “better angels” inherent in our DNA we can integrate the emotional, essential side of our common humanity with an intellectual appreciation of the fallacy of divisive, larger group identities.

QUIZ
1.  It's been approximately 10,000 years since humans have started an agrarian settled existence.  How long do anthropologists think it takes genetic adaptations to appear in humans?
A: 25,000 years 
2.  Among anthropologists, the !Kung people of the Kalahari desert in Africa are thought to be representative of what?
A: How our hominid ancestors lived for over a million years before the advent of agriculture.
3. Junger argues that only this country retains a sufficient sense of community to mitigate the effects of combat on a mass scale.
A: Israel
4.  What demographic group provides proportionately more soldiers to America's wars?
A: American Indians
5.  Navaho legend talks of "skinwalkers", lone members of the tribe that have gone rogue with supernatural powers violently praying on innocent members of the tribe, having no moral compunction.  Who does Junger associate in modern society to the Navajo legend?
A: Lone gunman committing rampage attacks

DQs
1.  Is it possible to apply Junger's ideas of human contact and interaction to a group larger than a classic hunter-gatherer type tribe? A country? The world?
2.  Are Junger's basic human instincts of sharing, compassion, and altruistic group defense something that can fit into a larger human identity or are these divisive near-superstitions that hinder the intellectual pursuit of a cosmopolitan identity.