Rishon Rishon

Tribal and Individual

Amritas gives me his first in-context link. Needless to say, I am very gratified. He says:

David Boxenhorn made me see that humans are caught between being tribal animals and truly independent beings.

I started this blog because I wanted to communicate. Communicate what? Just communicate – humans are communicating beings, it is one of our defining characteristics. (This is one aspect of our tribal nature – individuals have no need to communicate.) However, if I were to pick one thing, it would be my worldview. I don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and write it out in one cohesive fell swoop – writing these short posts are enough of a challenge for me. But I’ve put a lot of time and effort into figuring out my worldview, and I hope that with the passage of time it will become clear.

I don’t know how Amritas meant his statement, but if I put on my western-culture hat for a moment, it sounds negative to me – it sounds like humans should strive to overcome their tribal past and be “independent beings.” To me, this is a lost cause – we can’t change our nature, and any attempt to deny it only makes us miserable.

Putting my own hat back on, it sounds different (perhaps this is what Amritas meant, too?) – humans are both tribal animals and independent beings. With the proper attitude, these two ideas are not contradictory.

This is deeper than it seems in translation. The Hebrew doesn’t use the word “only” in the second line; instead it uses two different words for “for myself”. The word it uses in the second line can also be translated as “by myself”.

The individual strengthens his individuality by strengthening the tribe, and the tribe strengthens its tribalness by strengthening the individual. This is no play on words, nor is it a ruse to fool people into supporting socialism – I most emphatically reject socialism as a dehumanizing idea. I also reject that stream of rational-individualist thought that denies our native tribal inclinations – that irrationally builds a system of values that is incompatible with human nature, and asks that we reject our nature in favor of “the truth”. I prefer what I might call a “neo-rational” solution, which satisfies both reason and human nature – my personal version of Occam’s razor – a truth that also makes us happy and psychologically healthy. According to this truth, being “caught between being tribal animals and truly independent beings” is not a curse, but a blessing. But more important, it is the truth that we must live with whether we admit it or not.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at May 5, 2004 10:51 PM