Tribalism Redux

Although this subject fits better my other blog, Ghulf Genes, where culture is the central subject, I’ve chosen today to post something there on Asian carp (link), a subject that more properly belongs here. So turn-around is fair play.

My subject, narrowly, is the Sequester, but behind it is something else. Behind the Sequester lies something more basic, something primitive: tribalism of a sort that, in human affairs, is only ever under control when one of two situations prevail. The first of these is wealth so abundant that conflicts of a tribal sort are unlikely to take hold; everybody has enough and then to spare, and in the resulting exuberance, the deeply biological is muted. Therefore this circumstance is extremely rare in human history. The other, and more common, is that a powerful overlord, by sheer overwhelming force, prevents tribal clashes or holds them in close check.

The modern world, up to fairly recent times, wallowing in the wealth bestowed by fossil fuels, represents the first. Such a vast eruption of wealth has never been before—but, presumably, collective control of rivers, to stimulate agriculture, say in China and along the Nile, may represent earlier cases where suddenly if only temporarily resources outstripped population growth.

Powerful empires represent the second, most notably, in recent memory, the Ottoman. One historian, Arnold Toynbee, once speculated that the Ottomans, Turkic peoples whose habits were formed by herding, translated this habit into conquest of people on whose tribute they lived—and to keep that tribute flowing, they adamantly suppressed the usual upwelling of tribal conflict.

Widespread wealth only mitigates tribalism when it is well-distributed—as rendered in the aphorism that a rising tide lifts all ships. Some of us numbers-crunchers, however, noted as far back as the 1990s already, a change in that pattern as the distribution of the wealth changed—so that the three lower quintiles of the U.S. population began losing their share, and the two top one’s began to gain wealth—the topmost soaring to the skies like a sudden Himalaya. In part this transformation has been due to what is known as productivity, thus the replacement of people by machines.

In recent times the mounting inequalities have become much more sharply visible as dropping real household income and unemployment for the lower quintiles, producing economic woes in part due to the erosion of the customer base on which commerce rests. And then—and this was really more accident than design—a black man, of the left, thus at least nominally representing the poor and the urban masses—not least the laboring masses who have been sliding down an tilting economic plane—came to be elected president. President Obama, of course, arguably, is only nominally black. He himself belongs to the upper elite. Nonetheless, in the great cloud that a culture actually represents, he has become symbolic for the “Other” among those elements of the population who are still enjoying wealth but threatened by the overall decline.

Hence now we have a major rebirth of tribalism under various names, Tea party the best known. And the country is now showing serious and terminal rifts. No matter how big a majority President Obama won in the last election—supported by the urban masses—those who voted for him, whatever their income, are seen by a large other grouping, as being the Other and therefore lacking legitimacy—and never mind the numbers. Therefore gridlock, stasis, and the Sequester. Will the returning tribalism manage to sink roots? If that should happen, we must be prepared for major change, very major. I used to hope that by the time that happens I’ll have joined to Dearly Departed. Now I’m beginning to fear that I’ll actually be here to see something of that happening in earnest.

Straws in the Wind

My reference is to the Legal Tender Act of 2011 (link), legislation that passed in Utah. It became effective March 25, 2011. The law makes federal gold and silver coinage legal tender in the state. The value of these coins may be based on their actual value as metal, not merely their face value. Why do I call this a straw in the wind?

When a society or a culture begins to break down in earnest, the functions performed at the highest level begin to be performed at a lower—in our case at the state and local level. I witnessed this myself as a boy in Germany immediately after World War II when the economy collapsed and the local currency entirely lost its value. An important memory of mine is a windy morning when, at an intersection, I saw a cardboard box chuck-full of Reichsmarks (Hitler’s currency) being blow down the street by the wind, and nobody bothered picking up the money. Black marketeering was illegal; barter was illegal too; you were supposed to exchange that worthless money, along with ration cards, for the few miserable goods actually available in stores. Our family lived by the black market, and I participated in it myself as ten-year-old helping my Father and Mother. We were busy—but acting in stealth.

When such breakdown begins, initially the actions are illegal. Then they are legalized. The Utah law is the action of a state of the Union. Someday the illegal Michigan Militia will emerge (or something like it) as the legal military force of a state that will have seen itself forced to take over defense. And Utah’s action comes in the context of the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) which the Supreme Court Upheld on May 26, 2011 (link). That law permits the State to prevent employers hiring illegal immigrants. For decades now that has seemed to me, anyway, the logical point of putting pressure on this system.

For years now I’ve been saying that the day will come when states like Kansas, say, will begin to impose tariffs on agricultural or mineral commodities leaving their borders—at first in the face of huge outcries, eventually with legal approval.

There is a word for this: Devolution. We’ve already seen that process in action, are seeing it now. It takes the entirely legal form of the Federal Government washing its hands of responsibilities and transferring the action to the states under the name of block grants. Once the duty has been transferred, the next step is to cut the actual funding of block grants gradually until the state either funds on its own or cuts it out. The Arizona law is a form of active devolution, grasping a responsibility the Federal Government is failing to perform. The Utah act is an instance of anticipatory devolution—making its citizens less subject to the sudden or slow devaluation of the dollar that, in Geithner-hands, will not be stopped by rigorous action.

At the cultural level I’ve discussed this subject as The Deformation, here. What grows complex must sometimes fall apart—unless it is a genuine improvement, maintained by deeper and more fundamental values and communal discipline. This law (“what goes up, must come done—unless it has reached and exceeded escape velocity”) applies to everything. In economics, in defense, in law generally—if the center fails, many lower centers will take over. And I’m seeing it happening now. Therefore “straws in the wind.”

But this also needs to be said: The Tea Party phenomenon is misunderstood. It is itself a sign of devolution. The party is seen as right-wing, etc., but it carries ideas, assertions, and demands that have, alas, the character of genuine value, like gold, values that time will not tarnish.