Postmodernism gets a lot of blame from many Premodernists and some Modernists for today's predicament. What is today's predicament? Though I can't speak for the rest of the world, in America, truth seems to play a diminishing role in our political causes. And many religious traditionalists like to blame Postmodernism for that rejection of truth. But truth be told, one only needs to listen to today's politically depressing verbiage to realize that there is at least one other cause for the disregard for facts and logic in America today. That cause is tribalism.
We are an increasingly tribalistic lot. Whether our tribes consist of a religious faith or political/economic ideology, a race or economic class, a national identity or language, we are becoming more and more tribal. The current backlash against those who kneel during the playing of our National Anthem serves as one illustration of that tribalism. Those who want the kneeling players to be punished are showing far more concern with whether their own nation is receiving proper respect than whether minorities are suffering from race-based violence and enforcement of the law by some of our police officers. From the fear of immigrants, especially those who are Muslims, overrunning or attacking our nation from within to the inability of our 2 major political parties to adequately work together, we see a growing tribalism. We also see this tribalism when some of my fellow Leftists shamefully try to shutdown speaking events that feature conservative or liberal speakers just as we see this tribalism in the on-air speech of people like Rush Limbaugh. And we definitely see a growing tribalism in the blogs where conservatives, liberals, and leftist bash all those who do not belong to their own groups.
Recently, I have had it with one now former Facebook friend who, while discussing whether vaccines cause autism, called every piece of documentation that didn't support his group's side 'propaganda.' Of course, he didn't say why it was propaganda; I guess I was just suppose to take his word for it. But whatever documentation that didn't support his belief was immediately dismissed without explanation.
So how does tribalism contribute to our current Post-Truth era? We should note that tribalism starts when group loyalty starts to become strong. In terms of morals, when group loyalty is strong enough, then what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. That is because group loyalty prevents one from caring enough about morality to be willing to find fault with those from their own group when they have done others wrong.
As tribalism grows, so does group authoritarianism. With authoritarianism, truth is determined more and more by the credentials of the source than by the facts or logic used in an argument. So that, like the relationship between tribalism and morality, those who are from the group are assumed to be more trustworthy than those from outside the group. To believe someone from outside the group over someone from inside the group risks a significant amount of dissonance for those who highly value group loyalty. Therefore, either tribalism will demand that one believes members of their own group over those outside their group or that what is true is not important. That is because loyalty dictates that the group is what is most important.
We all belong to multiple groups to which we feel varying degrees of loyalty. And group loyalty is fine up to a point. But when group loyalty grows too strong, it begins to blind us so that not only does it cause us to embrace moral relativity, we begin to care more about the status and power our group obtains than we care about what is true. We begin to believe that our group has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them, as Martin Luther King said about the West when he spoke against the Vietnam War.
When we are involved with tribalism, our group authoritarianism builds the bonfires on which the truths taught by other groups are sacrificed. Thus, we don't have to act like those Leftists who try to shutdown the speaking events held by conservative and liberals because they have already deemed what others have to say as unfit for consumption. And then they substitute the delusions of our own groups for those truths that exist outside their own small worlds.
If we want a world where truth matters, we will curb our enthusiasm for group loyalty. And that is despite what we have been taught about the virtue of being loyal. So instead of holding our groups as close as possible to our hearts, we will recognize that loyalty, especially excessive loyalty, can sometimes be self-destructive rather than self-preserving.
No comments:
Post a Comment