David R. Samson
Footnote Press
Just in case you missed them, in recent years social science researchers (myself included) have been falling over themselves to publish books purporting to help us overcome the more damning of human characteristics 鈥� bias, greed, nepotism and similar.
Taking perhaps a bolder approach, in Our Tribal Future: How to channel our human instinct into a force for good, anthropologist offers a possible cure for such vices by confronting our worst tribalistic instincts head-on.
Advertisement
Tribalism, the predilection to favour members of in-groups over others, is the foundation of our problems, he argues. We bias behaviours for and against people based on whether they appear 鈥渓ike us鈥� when we meet them.
Whether someone speaks in a similar way to us, has similar colour skin, or wears clothing or jewellery indicative of their heritage 鈥� these are the kind of signals underlying our preferences.
Samson shows a deep understanding of many fields and combines research from these areas to argue his position, and to offer a 鈥渧accine鈥� for what he calls the 鈥淭ribe Drive鈥�.
Our tribal instincts served us well in preindustrial society, where issues of trust and exploitation made gullibility potentially fatal, but now the tribe drive leads us to widespread conflict. To the degree that we treat people who aren鈥檛 in our group as less than people, we perpetuate the source of violence worldwide.
For Samson, one of the best things we can do to combat our tribalistic drive is to surround ourselves with people 鈥� family, friends, colleagues and so forth 鈥� that we believe are likely to be mutually supportive. Insofar as we can ensure that those in our immediate circles are like-minded people, we can then start to plan together how to best treat others.
Smaller groups, or 鈥渃amps鈥�, as anthropologists call them, of collaborative partners are likely to be happier and more secure than those who try to go it alone. We don鈥檛 need to live in isolated places to do this and can just as easily live next door to our best friends in Anglesey as we can share a compound in Antarctica.
Camp-building, for Samson, can bring us back to the more egalitarian world in which our species evolved.
This doesn鈥檛 mean that larger bodies, like cities, states and countries, couldn鈥檛 exist effectively, but that their effectiveness would be buoyed by the safety, security and happiness of their citizens living in small camps within them.
Samson supports this with multiple references to artificially designed communes where residents report greater happiness than elsewhere 鈥� although he does, perhaps a little conveniently, leave out the high degree of exploitation and other unpleasantness found in many isolated cults.
There are undoubtedly many merits to Samson鈥檚 views, and his focus on the community level is both commendable and attractive, but I would still recommend reading Our Tribal Future with some scepticism.
Occasionally, he takes the arguments to extreme places, with suggested mantras and rituals that are hard to take seriously, such as reciting 鈥淚 am a member of team human!鈥� over and over again to yourself.
And his belief that technology can solve modern issues of trust is not justified.
For example, the decentralised, peer-to-peer digital systems for simultaneously recording transactions between different parties in many separate places underlying Bitcoin, do remove some of the risks of exploitation. But that doesn鈥檛 mean that people can鈥檛 be blackmailed or suffer other harms. The trust issue, as always, is with the people using the technologies, not the technologies themselves.
There鈥檚 also an underlying worry that some 鈥渂ad actors鈥� could use his anthropologically informed guidance about how to craft a supportive camp to build more pernicious, better organised cults.
What is interesting 鈥� and I wish he had talked a little more about it 鈥� is that Samson grew up in a Christian cult, and despite his obvious erudition, his escape into the wider world has not led him to disavow anything that looks cultish. If anything, this book is a treatise that combines his past life with his present knowledge.
Nonetheless, in a modern world where exploitation is common and trust hard to come by, the idea of building a smaller network of connections is attractive. Surrounding ourselves with those we cherish may make us feel secure enough to deal better with outsiders and others 鈥� thereby helping us rid the world of the worst kind of tribalistic thinking.听
Jonathan听R.听Goodman听is a听writer听and an interdisciplinary researcher at Darwin College, Cambridge and at Cambridge Public Health
