Tribalism and the Sacred Part 1
We have argued in this space that the state of democracy in America is both worse and better than people think. Better, because despite the bad-faith perfidy of many reporters and commentators, the American dream lives on and because democratic norms and procedures have proven more resilient than critics give them credit for. People forget that, despite the worst efforts of those on January 6th, the center held.
A too-narrow focus on headline politics – grand presidential initiatives, culture war volleys and follies, primaries and elections – quickly creates the illusion that if we could just fix this little problem, or if we could just tweak this little thing, then everything would be just fine. In an earlier essay, we described this kind of magical thinking as part of the gnostic legacy and a perennial temptation that ends up making things worse than better. Medical interventions carry risks and may often produce known and unknown side effects; even more so with political interventions, which often prove in retrospect to bear the fruit of our ignorance. Under the best of circumstances we operate with incomplete information corrupted by all sorts of biases … and politics never presents the best of circumstances.
Healthy people can sometimes look sickly, and sick people can have a robust glow about them. So too with a polity, a problem compounded by the fact that we might easily misdiagnose the disease based upon a superficial reading of the symptoms. This tendency becomes even more pronounced in a 24-hour breathlessly reported news cycle. It’s hard to think clearly in the age of click-bait and when people demand of us that we take sides. I repeat Tocqueville’s important claim in his introduction to Democracy in America: it is my job to “finish by pointing out myself what a great number of readers will consider as the capital defect of the work. This book follows in no one’s train exactly; by writing it I did not mean either to serve or to combat any party; I set about to see, not differently, but farther than parties; and while they are concerned with the next day, I wanted to think about the future.” [emphasis added]
The parties will always obsess about horse-race politics, because winning elections is their primary function. Their water-carriers in the media will obsess likewise either because they think it’s good for ratings or because they have a stake in the outcome. But on this site we aspire to see things as wholly as possible, knowing that world-history did not begin 15 minutes ago, nor will it end if the “wrong person” gets elected president.
All this by way of introduction to a rather interesting essay published six years ago called “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0.” (paywalled) It’s a rather lengthy essay, and goes into some fairly deep philosophical discussion, but I think it has some merits that are of value to contemporary readers: it puts together a pretty neat typology of our deeper social and political problems, and it suggests some measures that might have some success in addressing those problems.
First, the title. Why “memetic” tribes? The term, derived from the Greek word for “to imitate,” comes (as nearly as I can tell) from Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene and refers primarily to the idea that culture gets passed on via information being selected and copied. “Memeplex” refers to a group of memes that reflect and reinforce one another. In an age where we silo off our information sources, we all inhabit memeplexes, which in many ways (note well) look and operate like a religion.
The authors (Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes) argue that America has fractured into such memeplexes, each seeking “to impose its distinct map of reality – along with its moral imperatives – on others.” In other words, they take their own experiences of the world, turn them into ideas or symbols which then become more real than the actual experiences (or become the interpretive framework for the raw data of experience, which interpretations we then refer to as “lived experience,” as if there is any other kind), and then get imposed back on the world as a substitute reality. Ideologies operate as procrustean beds that lop off inconvenient, recalcitrant, or unaccounted for aspects of reality. These political ideologies operate as a kind of dream that seems more real than the actual world we inhabit, and draw adherents deeper and deeper into their narcoticized slumber.
Memeplexes, the authors argue, have common characteristics: they are optimistic (“just let us run things and everything will be ok”); they operate will grand solutions that require large-scale adjustments of both social institutions and citizens; they claim to be speaking on behalf of “marginalized” groups, or groups out of power; and they see themselves as being blocked from their destiny by rival groups, meaning that they operate with a paranoid style. Although they don’t mention him by name, there is some overlap here with the theory of “mimetic desire” articulated by René Girard, who argued that “mimetic desire” (wanting things that other people want or have) will lead to “rivalry” and conflict. Limberg and Barnes argue that members of our “memetic tribes” want to determine all relevant social facts and also to determine the outlines of what is sacred and what is profane.
Even in an age such as ours the distinction remains important, although we no longer use those terms. Sacrality refers to something “wholly other” than the natural world, accompanied by an experience of tremendum (an awe-inspiring sense of mystery) when faced with an overwhelming power. The sacred possesses a special, protected status: we must metaphorically remove the sandals from our feet as we approach the sacred thing when it shows itself to us. “Sacrality” is a way of being in the world whereby we transform “profane” experiences and things such as sex and bread and wine into “sacraments” that allow us to commune with the sacred. The sacred world is a purified one and the profane world a polluted one, and the sacred must be guarded by sanctions against impious polluters.
As I said, the terms “sacred” and “profane” might not have much currency these days, but the concepts are in our DNA. The question is: what is the primordial power before which we must kneel and whose sanctions we must respect? All religions operate with a notion of “sacrifice” to the sacred power, and that which is sacrificed acts as an intermediary between us and the sacred. In ancient religions the sacrifice always involved a victim of some sort, meaning that violence and victimhood were somehow at the center of cult, and thus culture. According to Girard, the violence engendered by mimetic desire led to scapegoating, whereby the universal violence is channeled into a single victim, with the result that everyone else becomes reconciled to each other. The cultic practice centers on the ritual reenactment of the victimization and serves to restore and maintain unity within the social group. In that sense, the sacred, the victim, and suffering forms a triad that operates as a foundation for social life. The greater the suffering, the more sacred the object. This helps explain the “suffering sweepstakes” we often engage in, at its apogee the concept of intersectionality.
There are two important developments to this ancient phenomenon. The first involves Christianity’s insistence on the innocence of the victim, which breaks through the surrounding mythologies of the ancient cults. No longer can the community reenact lies about the place of the victim (who “had it coming”) and the attendant violence. Girard argued that in this sense Christianity brought to an end the cycle of violence and its reenactment that drove the dynamics of ancient social order. Christianity reverses the moral status of the victim, and by extension the statuses of oppressor and oppressed. One result is to see the oppressed, however defined, as inherently innocent and the oppressors as inherently evil. It is essential to see that this oppressor/oppressed dynamic emerged only within Christianity and makes very little sense outside of that whole theological context. Part of the crisis of our world is trying to cling to the structure of the dynamic without benefit of the full theological explanation that justifies the moral distinction.
Along those lines, modern thinkers see all our fellow humans as potential oppressors, and so to relieve this tenuous estate we create the modern nation-state that monopolizes the use of violence. Since we are all (potential) victims seeking protection, we take refuge in the newly created language of rights. We expect others, including the state, to respect our rights and not trample on them. Our language of rights, therefore, depends on ideas of victimhood. Furthermore, we are all obliged not only not to interfere with the rights of others, but also to punish anyone who infringes on the rights of anyone. In our modern parlance, we become allies of the sacralized victims. The reversal is complete: the community can be healed and united by visiting violence on the victimizer or the oppressor.
Remember also that the dynamic requires the presumed innocence of the victim. Our contemporary politics involves a disagreement over the innocence of the victim, but more importantly dispute over who the victimizer really is: Is it the patriarchy? Is it white people? Is it the elite? Is it corrupt politicians? Is it the government itself? Notice we tend to think of victimizers in terms of their group status rather than ascribing individual guilt. Treating others solely in terms of their group status allows us to treat them as objects rather than subjects like ourselves. Our groups/tribes organize themselves around answers to the question of victimizing and surround their answers with the same inviolable myths and rituals that were features of ancient religions.
One of the seeming paradoxes of our politics involves how individualism and grouping co-exist. We argue that the more atomized we become, the more susceptible we are to the temptations of collectivities. This tendency toward creating privileged group status on the basis of victim claims is a determinative feature of our age. Those who question the tendency are, given the relationship between victimhood, suffering, and the sacred, held to be guilty of blasphemy and may well be taken out behind the city gates where they will be, at least metaphorically, stoned to death.
In next week’s essay, we will take a deeper dive into the Limberg and Barnes argument, as well as consider their proposals for how we might best move forward together.
Discussion Questions:
What is meant by scapegoating, and how does it manifest itself in our current politics?
What is the difference between “associative life” and “identity groups”?
What is an ideology, and is it possible not to have one?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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