(October 30, 2019 at 10:08 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: I wouldn't throw tribalism into the trash just yet, if humanity's continued survival is the context. Tribalism is a more effective organizing force than humanitarian concern. Human xenophobia, likewise, useful if we're going to spread beyond our little pond.
While others see our behavioral patterns changing if/when we head out there, I see history becoming even more precient. The exportation of violence and irreparable enviromental exploitation of the earliest human civilizations probably has alot to tell us about what we'll look like as a multi planet species.
We'll move the hearth fire west every day, cutting down the jungle for fuel as we go. Eating anything that moves and killing whatever isn't edible. If the "tribe" engaged in that work sees itself as separate from the greater human society it's efforts serve, so what..they're on the fringes, where we've always sent our headhunters and cannibals and slavers and rapists and pillagers. That tribalism will be well employed by those people, just as it always has been here.
Tribalism might be a more effective organizing force, But it also guarantees the organization’s efforts would be ineffectively dissipated in fratricidal struggles against the organization of the other tribes.
Tribalism might seem a powerful and expedient tool, but in the end it would signify little. Most of its reward is but brief schadenfreude for a few before they too are consumed.