Tribe, Club, Family

It seems to be a thing – with people younger than me, anyway – to refer to one’s circle of close peers as a ‘tribe’.

I can’t bring myself to do that, but I will in all candor confess that the term is far more palatable – to me, anyway – than the previous generation’s term of preference, ‘posse’.

In my day, my circle of close peers was my ‘gang’. I felt secure in that term; after all, I had Spanky, Buckwheat and Alfalfa on my side.

On the other hand, gang can reasonably connote an association of hoodlums – a more common interpretation today than it was in the years of Boomer youth. When I deployed the term at 16, it never occurred to me that it would imply that I was wearing colors or defending a turf; but today, I wouldn’t want to tell a bartender that I’m just waiting for my gang to show up; he might pull out his shotgun and place it in arm’s reach.

Posse is worse, I have to say; that word conjures flashes of bloodthirsty men in dirty rawhide riding alongside John Wayne into the badlands, hankering to shoot a bandit. I was once part of a small circle of friends who called us a posse. I was always curious who it was we were after.

So, tribe it is, I guess.

But here’s my problem: tribe doesn’t mean either of those things. A tribe is not mission-driven, nor is it a group we self-select into. A tribe is a permanent social unit, a community, and is based on kinship. Gangs and posses are most certainly not.

And the term tribe isn’t used for that today. It’s used for the other two.

The media like to use the word tribal to refer to the collective behaviors of all sorts of groups – political parties, religious organizations, that sort of thing. In fact, so commonplace is that usage at this point that even behavioral scientists sometimes serve it up in that context.

If we’re going to get serious about it, we need to break down tribe according to its formal definition: a taxonomic category denoting a social division. We find in a tribe an association of family groups linked by shared social, economic and cultural features and history.

And, as the saying goes, we can choose our friends, but we don’t choose our family. If I join the Crips or the Bloods, I’m deciding to be Crippy or Bloody; if I find myself among the 17^th century Mashantucket Pequot, well, I was either born there, traded, or assimilated at a young age. Not my choice.

I’d likely be fine with that, as it happens; historians have noted that Native Americans taken from their tribe and transplanted into European Polite Society tended to get the hell back into the woods at the earliest opportunity; and, for that matter, white kids absorbed into Native American tribes in childhood, then liberated and returned to their families, likewise got the hell out and went back to their adopted tribes as fast as they could. Ben Franklin himself observed,

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

An actual tribe is a superfamily in which you don’t pick your relatives; it’s a big, glorious, messy mix that nobody has any say in. You’re among kin, and there’s a considerable range of worldview, temperament, and turn of mind.

Gangs and posses aren’t like that; they’re essentially clubs, social collectives in which worldview, temperament and turn of mind are more or less held in common. Indeed, conformity to some shared mission, with some attendant set of traits, is required for membership in the first place.

And now we have arrived at our point. Today’s tribes aren’t really tribes; they’re clubs. They’re groups you join to be around people just like you – some attendant set of traits, some common purpose, some convenient bond that makes it useful to join up.

But in a tribe, that convenience generally doesn’t exist. Different temperaments and viewpoints flourish; more often than not, nobody is on the same page; common purpose isn’t built in, it has to be laboriously constructed.

Tribe as tribe should be family – messy and difficult and unpredictable, requiring our determination, resilience, patience, empathy, and best negotiation efforts to make work. This is vastly more difficult than joining a club, where consensus is for the most part built in, and cooperation is not only a given, it’s the entire point.

When we join a tribe that’s a club, our determination, resilience, patience and empathy are not required; all that’s asked of us is our conformity. When we join a tribe that’s a family, we need to bring our best efforts, and our determination, resilience, patience and empathy; but they will be strong and enduring – because they get a regular workout.

And here’s the most important point: joining any social group is about identity, and that’s one of the most important facets of our lives. Consider that Tribe-as-Family and Tribe-as-Club represent two entirely different kinds of identity.

The identity of the members of a club is determined by the club; conformity to the club’s standards and expectations drives membership, in that the more I conform to them, the more I’m in the club. When I stray from them, my membership can be called into question. The club defines its members.

But in a family, it’s the other way around. We’re born or adopted into families, and there’s a lot of lottery-of-birth at work; the standards and expectations arise from whatever Nature has deposited in the cauldron, and differences are persistent and often extreme. The family is defined by its members.

That’s what a tribe is – a social unit in which the richness of diversity sums into a unique community of individuals whose ability to be people is strong, because all the cognitive and emotional muscles required to be a strong person are used all the time. In clubs, those muscles all too often go flaccid.

Apart from actual tribes, of which there are almost none anymore, the closest we can get to the true dynamic is the military infantry squad – a small group of guys who were thrown together at random, with no regard to their race, ethnicity, background, wealth, religion, or political persuasion. They live and almost die together, day in and day out, on some deadly foreign terrain for some period measured in months – and not only do they learn to get along and cooperate, they wind up bonded more deeply than siblings, getting together annually without fail, though thousands of miles separate them, for the next 60 years. That’s tribe.

Imagine, briefly, what our current moment would feel like if we started doing tribe as tribe should be done; if these shallow and dangerous clubs we’ve all huddled into weren’t the driving force in society, arbitrarily dividing us and turning us against each other; if we began self-selecting into social collectives based not on our sameness but on our diversity. Imagine the workout our humanity would get, day in and day out; imagine how our agency in our communities, in the world, would be energized.

It's the next-best thing to being a 17^th century Mashantucket Pequot; and way better than being a Crip or a Blood…