Tribal Boundaries

Life is organized by setting boundaries, most of them somewhat arbitrary. There are the too-much-fought-over boundaries between nations, of course. Not mountain ranges or rivers or coastlines, but straight lines crisscrossing the land, like the Mason-Dixon Line, or the Four Corners where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. Then there are the dividing lines between all sorts of arbitrarily organized groupings. Think of the color spectrum—where do you draw the line between red and orange, between orange and yellow? And yet we do. At what height do we consider someone short, or tall? Setting boundaries is an arbitrary business, sometimes with unfair consequences. We live in a world in which we can say something has crossed the line, is excessive, or is beyond the pale and yet be unable to pinpoint that boundary. Fuzzy boundary lines can be the cause of much mischief, unfairness, and even injustice.

If ever a blurry boundary came with unfair consequences, hate-based tribalism is it, and it is on the rise. By hate-based tribalism I mean a propensity to dismiss, distrust, disparage, deride, demean, and demonize “the other” with a sense of righteous intolerance. However much we may feel justified in forming tribes based on a shared hatred of others holding certain ideas and beliefs, tribalism focusing on racial hatred is in denial of a fundamental fact of life. Race is the ultimate blurry line. So blurry that it is now rejected as a viable concept. And yet racial constructs continue to infect most people. Even the concept of ethnicity is fuzzy. Maybe the time has come to stop referring to someone’s race or ethnicity but simply to one’s ancestry.

The aphorism that we are all one human family is no exaggeration: we are all related, no matter what skin color we have. Sorry, but we are all 120th cousins or closer, all sharing at least one ancestor, man or woman, who lived 3,500 years ago. Scientists have done the math. (Douglas T. Rohde, Steve Olson & Joseph T. Chang, “Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans,” Nature, vol. 431, September 2004, 562-5). To help with processing that bombshell, start counting your ancestors working backwards, from two parents to four grandparents to eight great-grandparents and so on. If you go far enough back, you will get a generation far larger than the population of the entire planet, then or now.

The only way to fill all those slots in our family trees is for specific men and women to appear in multiple slots. Lots of pairs, lots of times. In other words, their descendants are marrying cousins, albeit distant ones. I can see the process at work in my own family tree. Going back to the late sixteenth-century, I have been able to document that I am the descendant of thirty-four couples who were cousins, descended from fifty-one couples who married between 1580 and 1688, roughly twelve generations back. The couples vary from first to eighth cousins, marrying in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. My parents, Dad from Boston, Mom from Virginia, had no idea that they were cousins ten times over, eighth and ninth cousins. But as I say, if we could fill in actual names in our family trees back to 1022, a majority of the names would be at least thirtieth cousins.

And so on back 120 generations. If all humans are related, then whatever else we may choose to argue about, racial purity is a hoax. And once we come to regard the construct of race as a form of fake news, the question is how to live in a world where boundaries between so-called races are blurred and fuzzy, calling into question any judgment as to who is in and who is out. Why is a swarthy “white” perceived differently from a fair-skinned Black? If the local KKK leadership faced a lineup of ten men of varying skin tone from “white” to “black” and were asked to vote in secret on which of the ten was most likely to have dishonored the local white girl, how would they vote? I have no idea, but I know the lines are blurred. How Black is too black, how Asian is too Asian? And really, how white is white enough for white supremacists? We are all beautiful! We are all consanguineous! We just need to stop the family feud.

What anti-abolitionist David Goodman Croly in 1863 called miscegenation is no longer taboo: “racial” intermarriage is trending. Nowadays, stories of ancestral intermarriage are not a source of shame, but of pride. That trend is healthier than the opposite extreme, inbreeding. How closely related can couples be before their offspring would be considered inbred? Again, the boundaries are blurry. In the West, that seems to mean first cousins, blurring on the way to second cousins, and no longer setting off alarms by maybe fourth cousins, whereas some other cultures actually prefer close-cousin marriages. And even incest taboos, while almost universal, vary in the specifics.

How easily we empathize across ethnic and cultural boundaries may turn out to be a leading indicator of whether we play a part in advancing human progress. And maybe the blurriness of the boundaries assists us in bridging our way slowly across.

Nevertheless, however many of us find love after hate, history shows us that there are always gainsayers and skeptics who cling to their fears and grievances, and cling to each other. Many tribal beliefs spreading through social media are hoaxes—like the QAnonsense of preposterous conspiracy theories that defy logic and science. The more idiotic, the more buy-in. Ignorance loves company. The know-nothings vilify those who are too educated, too liberal, too connected with the wider world as being “not-our-kind” or even as evil-doers.

Nothing reminds us of this foolishness as much as facing a common external threat. After the unprovoked attacks of 9-11, for a good while Americans came together to appreciate what we cherish about this country, for all its imperfections. Unlike other nations, we are bound together first and foremost not by the bond of one ethnicity and one religion, but by the belief in something that transcends ethnicity and religion, that we are “a new nation,” as only Lincoln could put it, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men [and women] are created equal.” We are the first such nation born of that belief. In the political strife of recent years, the spirit of sharing in that belief has eroded, but if history is any guide, this too shall pass. The unprovoked war in Ukraine is having an effect similar to that of 9-11.

We need to get past the notion that cultural appropriation is theft. Heavens, our human species has been at it from the get go. I see it as the sincerest form of flattery. Whites honor First Peoples in their placenames—the names of twenty-seven out of fifty states—countless names of towns, mountains, rivers, lakes, brooks and islands. We know we are using their words for papoose, powwow, sachem, squaw, tomahawk, wampum, and wigwam. But we also evoke the Algonquian world every time we say canoe, chipmunk, hickory, moccasin, moose, muskrat, opossum, pumpkin, raccoon, skunk, squash, succotash, toboggan, woodchuck, or caucus. Yes, caucus. We don’t even give our assimilation a second thought. But language assimilation can remind us how the boundaries that we use to define us versus them are mercifully permeable.

So then let us rather feel a sense of belonging based on a shared culture. And let that culture sooner or later reject hatred and cultivate empathy. Let it evolve beyond norms now deemed unjust, and embrace others, indeed live by the Golden Rule, which has been there all along, if only we would practice what we preach. The tribe I am proudest to belong to believes in human decency. As Theodore Parker said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And that boundary, too, will expand, despite the gainsayers yet unborn. Our more enlightened forebears who were ahead of their peers show us how we too can be out in front of our more skeptical peers, to the eternal gratitude of our more enlightened descendants who will do their part to bend that arc toward justice for all.

© 2022 Thomas M. Paine

Letting go of boundaries, Villa Cimbrone, Ravello, Italy