My Tribe, Right or Wrong

The situation is tense, as the two groups glare angrily at each other, sometimes spitting insults and curses. They have travelled long distances to get here, with the sole intent of gaining victory and not just defeating the enemy but inflicting abject humiliation too. At any second, something’s going to give, and then the deadly fight will begin in earnest.

What’s going on here? Is this the scene of some armed conflict, barely contained? A peacekeeping force faced by an armed insurgency? Or perhaps a couple of street gangs about to take each other on? Nope. This is two groups of sports fans ready to do metaphorical (and sometimes literal) battle even as their teams battle on the field or the ice or the court.

In recent weeks, many of us have gone through the playoff season of leagues like the NBA and the NHL. And these attitudes are typical of the deep tribalism that surrounds the local sports team. For the first half of each calendar year in particular, the air is thick with them. Every league that started play in the late summer or early autumn begins working its way toward the playoffs, and the tribalism ramps up to a fever pitch by the time they arrive.

Must’ve been some hockey game! (By Andy L (DSC_0466 Uploaded by Skeezix1000) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

We’ve all seen it (or done it ourselves): people in a city or town focusing on the sports team as a way to express their identification with their home. The team becomes “us” and “we” (“We won the game!” or “That referee robbed us!”), people are euphoric when the team is up and depressed when the team is down, and at game time, they get a sort of “mob mentality” that can sometimes override their rationality. (Soccer riots, anyone? Fist fights in the stands? Burning cars after the team loses the cup? Or even after it wins?) In recent years, fans of particular teams have even been called “nations” (“Maple Leaf Nation,” say, or “Red Sox Nation”). We’re all in this together, baby! Let’s go paint our faces in the team colors!

But of course, most people, maybe a majority, are not sports fans. That sort of fan behavior is just too, too childish and unsophisticated, and these people, at least, are more into the arts or cooking or business or other types of interests. Thank goodness they’ve escaped that primitive tribal mentality.

Our school — so obviously superior to all those other schools

Hold on, there! Not so fast. It’s not that easy to escape tribalism. If you’ve ever felt personally insulted when someone has said something bad about your hometown or your alma mater or your country—sorry. You’ve got the virus too. You may not overturn cars or paint your face, but you are probably in as deeply as anybody. Like it or not, human beings seem hardwired to form tribes, originally based primarily on kinship, but these days, based on everything from the happenstance of people’s birth location to their choice of entertainment genre (Star Trek or Star Wars? Comics or manga?) to the happenstance of the religion or school loyalty they were raised in. And once a tribe is formed and one’s membership is rooted, all bets are off.

It’s all in good fun, though, right? Well, aside from the occasional brawl in the stands or prank pulled on the other school’s mascot. Nobody ever takes it too far these days, do they?

Au contraire. Since tribalism is so visceral and so often bypasses the rational mind, if something goes wrong, it goes really wrong, and things can get pretty ugly, pretty quickly. Freud’s ideas about in groups and out groups really hold up here. Being part of an in group gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling. Everybody in the group is your sister or brother, and you’ve got each other’s backs. But what does that make people in the out group? The exact opposite of the in group. Those people don’t make things “warm and fuzzy,” but “cold and prickly.” Rather than being your fond siblings, they are the anti-family. They may, in fact, become The Enemy.

Margaret MacMillan, in “The War that Ended Peace,” her book about the factors leading up to World War I, talked about many of the peace organizations that existed in Europe just before the war. Their membership and declared brotherhood crossed national boundaries, and many of these groups resolved that even if some kind of war broke out, their members would refuse to take up arms. Yet when the moment came, the tribal pull of country was stronger than the pull of the cause, and it was irresistible. “My country, right or wrong” prevailed, and a great many of these former peace crusaders answered the call to war despite their pre-war principles.

But don’t forget that if a person feels let down by his or her tribe or “nation,” the intense loyalty can quickly turn to hatred within the tribe itself. That’s another ugly side of tribalism: despite extravagant protestations of loyalty, it rarely lasts if a tribe member screws up. You may not know the name, “Mitch Williams,” but Philadelphia Phillies baseball fans certainly do, and so do Toronto Blue Jays fans. It was the Phillies’ Williams who threw the pitch, in the final game of the playoffs in 1993, that Toronto’s Joe Carter hit to give the Blue Jays both the game and their second Major League Baseball championship in a row. Phillies fans turned on Williams in a raging instant, egging his house and even sending death threats. Most forgave him within a couple of years, since he openly acknowledged that he had messed up, but that doesn’t always happen.

Two very familiar tribes

In today’s political atmosphere, all it takes is one person on one “side” to express an opinion that the “tribe” isn’t supposed to hold, and the attacks from the person’s own tribe rage in from all over the Internet and may never stop. Just ask a conservative pundit who admits that a progressive person may be right about even one small thing what sort of death threats they get from their own tribe. Ask people in the tribe of a single political party how thoroughly they can hate others in their own party who pull for a different candidate in the presidential primaries.

Is it possible to escape tribalism? Maybe, a bit. If one holds to a rational position with all one’s strength, the tribal temptation can sometimes be held at bay long enough for opposing “tribes” to negotiate a compromise or sign a peace treaty or even understand and empathize with each other a little. That’s the only way real progress is ever made in any human endeavor, and it’s a testimony to the courage and strength of many great people, through history, that humans have overcome their innate tribalism often enough to accomplish what they have.

But we know what lurks beneath the surface. Let just one person say something like, “Your mother smells like elderberries” or “you must abandon your preferred candidate and vote for mine, or you will guarantee that the bad guy gets elected,” and boom! Off come the gloves again, and tribalism rules once more.

(A version of this article was previously published in the February 2015 issue of the now-defunct Zen Dixie magazine.)

Sometimes you just have to kiss Rex Murphy’s feet

Before posting this, I should explain my own position on things. I moved to Toronto from Calgary, early in 2000. So my number one team remains the Flames. But I’ve come to be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan too, by virtue of living here and being caught up in Leafs Nation. I don’t live, breathe, and sleep hockey anyway, so I get to stand “above it all,” for the most part. (Except when the Flames go on one of their surprising playoff tears, though that’s not been possible in recent years.)

Anyway. Last night, on CBC TV’s national news broadcast, The National, commentator Rex Murphy took on the Toronto Maple Leafs and the “apology” they did in every newspaper after missing the playoffs again — for the seventh straight year. And Murphy’s little…dissertation…was a thing of beauty, and had me laughing so hard I was almost crying. So for posterity, here it is:

Rex Murphy’s Maple Leafs Apology Commentary

(And I have to issue my own apology, because CBC’s Embed code — doesn’t. At least not on WordPress. But click to go there, and you will not be sorry!)

Mesopotamian Magic, With a Hint of Misogyny

Mesopotamian tablets

It wasn’t the good witches they were after, you understand – it was the bad ones. And yet…were there any good ones in the ancient Mesopotamian world?

Professor Tzvi Abusch, (The Rose B. and Joseph Cohen Professor of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Religion, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, Brandeis University) touched on this question and many others when speaking to a keen audience at the most recent lecture hosted by the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies: A Ceremony against Witchcraft: Mesopotamian Magic in Action. Guiding us through a ceremony against witchcraft, Abusch explained the ancient Mesopotamians’ view of magic. They felt it could either be used for good, in the case of herbalists or exorcists, or used for evil by sorcerers and witches. It was all magic; it just depended how you used it. At least, that was how it started.

Abusch took us through excerpts from nine tablets recording an Akkadian ritual conducted through a single night in July or August – the Maqlû, meaning “Burning” – in which a male exorcist worked on behalf of a very ill patient. At the time of these tablets, the view that every person’s fate was determined by the gods had changed to the idea that personal misfortune was caused by another person – a malevolent enemy who could work magic. And the only way to heal oneself was to call upon an herbalist, or in the case of this ritual, an exorcist, who could undo the evil spell and cast it back upon the witch or sorcerer instead. The gods were still very much in evidence – after all, the exorcist could only work by invoking their power – but human action had true significance.

The procedure involved creating a figurine that represented the evildoer, and then ritually burning it in a brazier to break the witch’s power. The flames were doused with water, which both cleansed the victim and carried the evil back to the perpetrator. Specific chants, calling upon the gods, were performed at each stage.

Sun-god, Shamash, who played an important part in the Maqlu ritual

While it was fascinating to go through the ritual step by step and learn what it meant, the real fascination in Abusch’s presentation was what this and similar rituals reveal about the daily life of the ancient Mesopotamians. Incantations like this would have reflected a perceived need in society. In fact, Doctor Abusch took us through two versions of this ritual: an earlier shorter one, and the later nine-tablet version that had become much more elaborate and took much longer to perform. This had to have reflected a greater need to ease the troubles of people who believed they were suffering from the malicious attentions of enemies.

 

Equally as fascinating — though unfortunately predictable — was the status of magic practitioners themselves through Mesopotamian history. In the early stages, magic was regarded as a neutral tool that could be used either for good or evil, by men or women. But over time, it became more genderized: those casting these troubling spells were generally assumed to be women, while all exorcists who undid the evil were men. Herbalists could still be either male or female, and there was still the occasional male sorcerer. But on the whole, this formula became pretty standard: evil women caused the magical trouble, and good men repaired it.

One can ask why this change occurred, and try to follow the texts for hints. But the problem, Abusch said, is that we only have texts from institutional repositories – royal archives or training establishments for exorcists. Neither would retain tablets that contradicted the official view of things. So all we’ve got are tantalizing hints that situations were different and more egalitarian at an earlier time, with existing texts that developed in response to some kind of change whose nature isn’t clear.

Thanks to Doctor Abusch, we were given an intriguing glimpse into the worries occupying the Mesopotamian mind, and the remedies devised to alleviate them. We may think we’ve come a long way since then, though medical science still hasn’t entirely superseded the invoking of deities to solve our ills and punish our enemies. But when we look at how often women are blamed even today for the problems in the world, we might shake our heads and think, “The more things change…”