Eco-Nalogies: On Tribalism (and Sports!)
When I see a stranger wearing a San Francisco Giants cap or jersey, I nod amiably at them and say, “Fuck the Giants.” If I do my job well enough, they’ll smile back and say, “Fuck the Dodgers!” No animus, no disrespect (no sucking up to those orange-and-black dirtbags, either…), just a playful, guilt-free exchange that brings both sides closer together over a non-common bond.
Now imagine that I see a stranger wearing a MAGA hat. “Fuck Trump!” I tease him good-naturedly—How likely is that stranger to interpret that interaction as playful? Even if I give all the right body language indicators, use the same friendly tone, how likely is this interaction going to end with a muttered response of “libtard” or “fucking communist,” etc? Pretty likely, indeed.
Now, most of you are probably thinking: ‘Baseball and politics aren’t exactly fair equivalents,” and you’re 100% right. Well, almost right. To paraphrase Paul Rudd in Anchorman, I’d venture you’re about “sixty percent right, every time.” Yes, these examples are obviously at divergent ends of the spectrum. But the forces of tribalism that tie such identity markers as sports fandom and political persuasion together remain the same.
The most obvious way to diminish the role of sports-induced tribalism is also its strongest supporting argument: The idea that, in the end, whoever wins doesn’t really matter. Yet, if anything, this lack of a legitimate basis for team identity only serves to better isolate the tribalism that fuels its manifestation: Even when there’s no real ‘prize’ to be competed over, everybody still wants to win.
The impulse to self-sort into ‘teams’ is one of the defining traits of human behavior. As a species, we developed in small roving bands, and tales abound of more open and generous tribes being overwhelmed and eradicated by their less trusting, more suspicious counterparts. It does not take an especially cynical view of human nature to uphold this framework: Out-group mistrust is but a simple product of in-group favorability.
Take a mother, for instance. She might hold nothing but love and well wishes for others, but what if the benefit of others comes into competition against benefit to her child? Naturally, she would choose her child, and, frankly, would be crazy not to. Thus does a tribal, out-group hatred follow organically from something as harmless and natural as in-group favoritism. I might not actually want all Giants fans to suffer eternally (no promises), but I know that any Giants World Series championship is one less that the Dodgers can compete for. And for a proud Angeleno such as myself, that simply cannot do.
In the Coen Brothers movie Hail Caesar, George Clooney plays Baird Whitlock, a famous actor who is kidnapped by a shady group of communist screenwriters and taken to their secret base in Malibu, where they attempt to mold him to their radical world conception. Movies, you see, aren’t really works of art, but are just convenient vehicles for extracting capital from an unsuspecting populace, all the while distracting them from the manifold evils of the capitalist machine. Gotcha.
Well, Baird does get it, or at least he thinks he does, and when he is brought back to the studio to report to his showrunner Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), he cannot help but espouse his new philosophy, albeit in a form even more dumbed-down than he had first received it. At first, Mannix listens patiently as Baird delivers a vapid, cynical critique of show business, how the artistry is only an illusion—How could he have been so blind all these years?!— and how it’s all just money, money and power, with a dash of indoctrination thrown in. But as his rambling goes on and on, Mannix finally cannot take it anymore; he walks over, grabs him by the front of his costume (ironically, he’s wearing a gold-plated suit of armor) and does the only thing he can: He slaps him hard on both cheeks. Then again, when he tries to talk back.
“You’re going to do it [act] because you’re an actor and that’s what you do. Just like the director does what he does, and the writer and the script-girl and the guy who claps the slate. You’re gonna do it because the picture has worth, and you have worth if you serve the picture, and you’re never gonna forget that again.” Amen, Mannix. Amen.
To some of you, it might seem like Mannix is arguing against a strawman, but Baird and the communists take exactly the same route that so many others regularly employ in denouncing sports as worthless, or even harmful to a given society. For really, who hasn’t heard it mindlessly spouted that sports are just modern-day gladiator matches, a sprawling, insidious tool of the political elite to occupy us from focusing on what really matters? I know I’ve heard it more times than I care to count. But again, this is just another example of someone being “sixty percent right, every time.”
To fully explain my position, I am forced to first recount a brief anecdote. A year ago, I was in a book club, and one of the first works we chose was Tribe by Sebastian Junger, a non-fiction piece exploring how our search for tribal bonds affects our decision-making. When we came together to discuss it, I found that one of my friends had received the argument in the exact opposite way as I had: While I found Junger’s aims to be centered around finding healthier ways to exhaust our natural yearning for tribal connection, she (a rather brilliant woman, I might add) believed that Junger was justifying our tribal hunger, and thereby found the book off-putting. Our differing interpretations (in my opinion) rested entirely on my friend’s tacit application of the ‘is-ought fallacy’: That she believed Junger’s constant reinforcement of our tribal identity (‘is’) was a tacit endorsement of how we should (‘ought’) act.
At the base of these two assumptions sits differing philosophies on how to overcome our biological impulses and passions. To my friend, tribalism is a pure evil that must be quenched, and anything less would be akin to pouring gasoline onto a fire. To me, tribalism is an ineradicable (if unfortunate) aspect of our identity, one that if we neglect to manage constructively, will (and surely has) come out in less and less positive and/or stable ways. To me, the advent of sports fandom is a positive outlet that, if allowed to flourish, can weaken our residual tribalism in politics and other fields. Sure, we may be reenacting some violent, gladiatorial fetish, but if no one is dying for it then what’s the harm?
In my view, my friend’s interpretation would have more substance if our current political tribalization was but the spearhead of an ever-more tribalistic society. But the fact of the matter is that our healthy outlets for tribe-seeking have never been more eroded. Never in human history have so many people lived alone. Never before have so many of us reported that, in case of some emergency, we would have no one to call. And in the era of COVID-19, especially, never in modern history have we been so physically isolated. (It doesn’t help that, when we do see one another, any facially-expressive nuance is shielded behind our masks.)
In early human history, being exiled from one’s tribe was a fate worse than death. But the downstream effects of that punishment lie not only on the potential exile, but on how far the remaining tribe members will go to avoid such shaming and humiliation. And to exile somebody undeservingly is no less damaging to the tribe than to continue harboring someone who has committed reasonable grounds for exile. In fact, it may even be worse.
Consider a list of common behaviors associated with cults:
The group suppresses skepticism.
The group delegitimizes former members.
The group relies on shame cycles.
The group uses ‘thought reform’ methods.
You are instructed to sever ties with friends and/or family members who do not subscribe to these policies.
Does any of this sound familiar yet?
Our political identities have become so polarized, so quasi-cultish, not because politics on its own is so impactful, but because we lack additional tribal identities through which to seek common ground with our ideological counterparts. A Democrat and a Republican might be able to get along if they both love fishing, and cars, and maybe even those no-good fucking San Francisco Giants, but all too often we are committing to exile one another before we can even make those connections. And every time we ‘other’ someone, we are implicitly inviting them to ‘other’ ourselves.
To me, Dodgers and Giants fans can peacefully co-exist because even our tribal opposition rests on the commonality of our mutual love of baseball. Likewise, amiable opposition in politics can only come about (or be restored) if we remember the shared battlefield on which it’s played. When our core identity ends at Democrat, or Republican, and doesn’t extend to American, then it’s no wonder that we cannot get along. How can you play the game when you can’t even agree on the rules? When each side is convinced that the other is stealing their signs or paying off the umpires? Even our precious ‘unwritten rules’ have fallen by the wayside, and every trick we can employ to win—PEDs, throwing at batters, dirty slides… filibusters, censorship, character assassination—is morally justified by our near-certainty that the other team is doing it, too.
Evolution does not select for vestigial traits. Where tribalism has worked, it has done so in the context of a sprawling abundance of overlapping tribes. Two countries might compel its citizens to war, but the cobblers in one might have more in common with the cobblers of the other than with the aristocrats ordering them to hate one another. Two men might disagree on progressive taxation, but at least they can bond over last week’s episode of Peaky Blinders. When appropriately framed, one seemingly-innocuous in-group bond can outweigh ten out-group prejudices. After all, late Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and Scalia represented the two far ends of judicial philosophy, yet still found the energy to vacation together with their families and discuss their mutual love of opera. If they could do it, why can’t we?
I contest that our tribal identity has become so dangerous not because tribalism itself has surged, but because it has been restricted to too few outlets. Like a boiling kettle of water with only one hole in its lid, the whistling is only going to keep getting louder.
If we can’t turn off the heat, we might at least consider removing the lid.