We Must Make Tribalism & Division Obsolete
They are a product of an ancient and primitive psychology that we urgently need to outgrow
(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays, after publishing the first version).
“If [humanity] is to survive, [we] will have learned to take delight in the essential differences between [people] and cultures” — Gene Roddenberry*
*Gene Roddenberry was oblivious to the sexism he was expressing when he used ‘men’ to say ‘humanity’, or ‘he’ when he meant to say ‘we’, or ‘us’. He was a product of his time. I took the liberty of updating his language to make it more inclusive. My words are in square brackets. I could have kept the original, and used [sic], but as a woman it grated on me, so I decided against it.
I thought I knew something about the Zionist Israeli settler-colonialist project, and Israel’s insane genocidal plans for the Palestinian people. Through my involvement with The Book Club on Palestine, I am learning more about how the events we are witnessing now, are just a repetition of almost identical events from the past. Going further down the rabbit hole, I recognise that our present problems stem from our species’ primitive and outdated beliefs in division, tribalism, race, entitlement, and competition.
Most parents would recognise the way children and teenagers behave when they discover, or experience something that is new to them. They can be quite arrogant about it, and more than a little smug and self-satisfied. It can be disappointing and discouraging to them to realise that their parents, and grandparents have already done, or known many of the things that they believe are new. We must never deprive children and young people of the awe, and the joy of discovering something that is new to them. They need this. (We must also reassure them, when they worry that what they are feeling or thinking is completely unique, and that no one has ever felt or thought the way they do).
As adults members of our societies, however, we need to stop behaving like children and adolescents. We must realise that we have not invented anything new. We share our human experience with our ancient ancestors from the early days of modern humanity. Everything we do now, has been done before many times over. Everything we feel now has been felt before, by every human being that has ever lived. We are not always sitting on the shoulders of our ancestors. More often than not, we think, feel, behave, exactly as they did, and make the same choices they made. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and nothing comes out of nowhere.
Israel’s settler-colonialism is a replay of human settler-colonialism, reaching back thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of years. For millennia, human groups invaded the homes of other groups, banished, or killed the inhabitants, and replaced them with their own people. I can imagine there was always some resistance, and that it was never something that invaders and colonisers welcomed. Successful settler-colonisers sometimes managed to kill enough of their victims to weaken, or prevent resistance. If they did not succeed in killing enough people, they resorted to incredible brutality to suppress, and break resistance.
Settler-colonialism has always been nothing more than simple theft, exploitation, expulsion, and mass murder. It emerged out of a sense of entitlement by settler-coloniser groups, and it was fuelled, and enabled by an absence of empathy towards the victims. There is also nothing new in the amount of effort invested in developing narratives to rationalise and justify hurting others. Crafting narratives to justify and rationalise the irrational and unjustifiable was always necessary to assuage any pesky guilt, or internal opposition, within the perpetrator group. You cannot be a successful settler-colonialist if you are bothered by a conscience.
There have always been empathetic humans. I would suggest that the majority of human beings are capable of empathy. But at every level of human society power has always resided firmly, and consistently in the hands of those who were entitled, in their own minds, and who lacked empathy. How do I know this? Easy. Look at human history. What we see is a record of wars, conquests, sadistic torture, oppression, control, murder, injustice, and endless (and completely unnecessary) human suffering, inflicted on humans by humans. The goodness we are capable of is there too, but it has never been in charge.
The skeletons in these ancient mass graves were once living, breathing, feeling human beings. Mass murders were indiscriminate and included children. You do not have to be a forensic expert to know with certainty that those human beings were terrified, and that they suffered before they were murdered. Archaeologists are excavating sites of mass murder from well over 10,000 years ago all around the world. This should give us pause to think, and consider why, and how, we are repeating our past.
Our technology may be changing fast, but human psychology, and our societal patterns are stuck in our distant, and inglorious past. We have been persuaded by scientists and technologists that humanity’s scientific and technological achievements are synonymous with ‘progress’, reason, and enlightenment; but this is evidently a lie. Our advanced technology serves the exact same purpose as did our distant ancestors’ flint spears and arrows. The technology we use to murder people may have changed. But the meaning, and the impact of killing, exploitation, and destruction have not changed, just because we use cyber technology, AI, or drones. The suffering of modern humans is the same as the suffering of our ancestors. No suffering is greater than that which is inflicted on humans by other humans.
And no, our technological achievements are not a sign of progress. A truly progressive species would place inclusiveness, empathy, and compassion at its core. A progressive species would realise that we are one species and that all of us have the same need not just to survive, but to develop and fulfil ourselves. A progressive species would turn physical survival into something that everyone can take for granted. It would then use its ingenuity to create societies and institutions that help everyone develop and live a full, and satisfying life.
When the Zionist movement started to tighten its hold on Palestine, and advance its sinister plan to remove the non-Jewish indigenous people, Europe’s colonial powers were in the process of giving up their colonies. There were too many inconvenient resistance movements, and after a big world war that exhausted the colonialists’ resources, colonies became too expensive to maintain. Israel is attempting to complete an ‘old-school’, ‘traditional’ settler-colonialist project in Palestine. The former colonial powers may no longer be doing what they used to do1, but their support for Israel shows that the ancient, primitive mindset behind settler-colonialism has never changed.
The stubborn support Israel is getting from its Western allies and their media is often interpreted and analysed in geopolitical terms. But geopolitical analysis is superficial. We need to look deeper. Our belief systems, feelings, and patterns of behaviour are always underneath, and behind everything we do, and they determine all of our choices. Israel is supported so vehemently, because the ideas of entitlement, racism, and the ‘right’ of people to use force to take what they want are not only alive and well but still dominate our world.
The Nazis did not invent ‘race science’. It was mainstream when the Nazis came to power. They just adopted it. ‘Race science’ was taught in universities and schools, and promoted by scholars and academics. It is a modern pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual attempt to rationalise a primitive, and ancient instinct; the same instinct that drove our ancient ancestors to develop a pecking order. Perhaps they were just hapless victims of a basic struggle to survive on a harsh planet, or just pawns in nature’s ‘survival of the fittest’ game. But that was then. What about now?
There are too many people on this planet who have not ‘grown up’. They still believe that we are in competition with one another, and that some humans are ‘better’, or more deserving than others. Too many people are unable to think of humanity as one species. They keep imagining that we are made out of competing species, ‘races’, that are locked into an unavoidable battle for survival. There are too many people, including politicians right here in the UK, who still believe that men are superior to women, or that white is superior to brown. It does not matter how many facts you throw at these people, their primitive, emotive beliefs are not amenable to evidence, or reason.
I get so angry when I hear ‘political analyses’ on the radio or TV (I do ration what I watch and listen to, or I would not be able to function). ‘Experts’ can be so intimidating, that ‘ordinary’ folks can think they do not know enough to speak out for the Palestinian people. What more do we need other than to know the difference between right and wrong? Do we really need anything other than empathy for the fear and anguish other humans feel when they and their children are hunted and killed? I always look for empathy. I cannot find much of it in the words or the eyes of reporters, presenters, ‘expert’ and ‘analysts’, especially those used by our disgraceful, and morally degenerate mainstream media. Everyone working in the mainstream media should hang their head in shame. There is no shame in all the places that enable and support Israel’s carnage.
Israel flaunts and weaponises the holocaust, a direct product of ‘race science’, while ignoring its own racism, and the genocide it has given birth to. Racism cannot lead to anything other than oppression, and murder. ‘Race science’, the modern 19th Century incarnation of primitive human tribalism is the only reason Israel is doing what it is doing to the Palestinians, and the Lebanese people. Is it not time we called their bluff? The only reason Israel is torturing and slaughtering tens of thousands of human beings is because of the belief that their imaginary ‘race’ is more entitled to survive than other, equally imaginary, ‘races’. Israel is built on racism. Israeli society believes that their ‘race’ can do whatever it wants to whomever it wants, if it feels threatened. If you asked any BBC or Guardian reporter or editor if they believe in ‘race science’, they would probably be horrified, and say they absolutely do not. Whether they realise it or not, anyone who supports Israel does so out of their own primitive, racist belief system. In other words, Israel’s supporters believe in ‘race science’.
I have always been a huge fan of StarTrek. Gene Roddenberry, who created it, imagined that a few hundred years into the future, humanity would finally do away with racism, tribalism, and competition. Humans would somehow grow up and realise that repeating the same patterns over and over again causes too much suffering, that it is self-defeating, and an insult to human potential. In the StarTrek universe, humanity gets together and recognises that we are all members of one species, and we all want to live and grow. StarTrek’s vision has never been more relevant, and it is time to turn it into reality. We cannot continue to blame forces beyond our control for all our troubles. We are not possessed by demons, and neither are we the helpless pawns of capricious gods. We are choosing our path.
We cannot wait for evolution to lead us to enlightenment. Based on evolution’s track record, I am not holding my breath. It is up to us, all of us, to make a conscious choice to change. Right now we are making an unconscious choice to continue to believe that some humans are more worthy than others, and allow this belief to dominate us. Covering our beliefs and actions with a thick layer of intellectualism, and the gloss of technology, does not change what lies beneath. Our actions show us up. As a species, we need to look in the mirror that our past and our present place before us, and ask ourselves if we like what we see.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard (to Ralph Offenhouse):
“A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” …
Ralph Offenhouse: “Then what is the challenge?”
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: “The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.”
― *Star Trek, The Next Generation. (Episode: ‘The Neutral Zone’. 1988).
*For non-Star Trek fans: In this 1988 episode of The Next Generation, the starship Enterprise comes across a defunct vessel floating in space containing cryogenic pods from the late Twentieth Century. When the three humans in the pods are revived and healed, they find the 24th Century very different from the reality they remember. The quote above is from a conversation between the Captain, and Ralph Offenhouse, a late 20th Century fifty-five-year-old financier, whose entire life was about the accumulation of money, possessions, and power. The part of the dialogue that I transcribed above appears towards the end of this short 3-minute clip. It is worth your while, even if you are not a StarTrek fan.
A comment on paid subscriptions
Substack encourages writers to apply paid subscriptions. They take a small cut to enable them to provide this, otherwise free-to-use platform. A few readers have pledged money for monthly or yearly subscriptions, to which I am grateful. I enjoy, and feel privileged to write and publish on this platform. But I am holding back on monetising my Substack channel, because I do not want to turn my writing into an obligation.
Below you will see a ‘buy me a coffee’ button. If you haven’t seen it before, it is a way of offering a donation to freelance writers, and others who provide similar services that are not paid work. Payments are processed securely on the ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ site, using Stripe, and I believe people can keep donations anonymous if they wish. This is entirely voluntary. Everyone is welcome to read my work free of charge.
Thank you so much for reading my work!
Of course, there are other ways to colonise. Economic imperialism has become the norm since the end of the Second World War. We are so immersed in ‘neoliberalism’ — the US and its helpers spread like a disease all over the planet — that we do not even realise we are all colonised.
“The age of nations has passed. Now, if we do not wish perish, we must set aside ancient prejudices and build the Earth”. - Teilhard de Chardin.
"People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things"
Zuckerman, Musk, Bezos, Gates, et al - I don't think they watched this one, not yet they did.
The race to the first trillionaire seem very much alive. What a special tribe they are.
That is one heck of a cynical and dangerous tribe we all could do without.
Edit:
Zuckerberg.