A student from another university interviewed me for a project of theirs…. this is an expanded and re-edited version of what happened.
Interviewer: So first question today, like in our Western society. Do you think that, like, tribalism or tribal attitudes have become really apparent or like just very obvious now?
JM: One of the reasons I don’t like talking about ‘tribalism’, as such, is because although the term seems to have a relatively clear meaning, and is commonly used, it obscures what’s happening, and implies that indigenous tribal people necessarily behave in a certain way, and they may not. It may also imply that people we call tribal in this way, are bound by blood, descent, tradition or something, when it can be a largely socially generated dynamic.
Consequently, I prefer to talk about the processes of the ways that people classify both themselves and others, within a politicised field of interaction with other people and groups, who are within and outside their own groups. This specifies more accurately what’s actually happening. To restate this, hopefully with more clarity: relations between (and within) groups, are the important areas of focus for this question. Does that make any sense?
Interviewer: Definitely.
JM: OK. So the question becomes ‘How are people coming to classify themselves more or less intensely in particular ways, and coming to relate, either in a friendly or hostile manner, to other groups?’
Interviewer: That’s exactly the question.
JM: This process is also partly about what people call ‘polarisation’, and I’m going to allege that polarisation happens as a result of particular ‘polarised classification’ in which everything important about people tends to be reduced to only two categories, and the two categories are then thought of as opposed, or as opposites, rather than as sharing a lot of features.
So its all about modes of categorisation. This is unavoidable. You don’t have language and society without social categories: men, women, children, old people, young people, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, workers, bosses, chiefs, headmen, wise women, sorcerers, medicine people, warriors, friends, enemies, trading partners and so on. So social categories are important.
All societies are full of social categories, possibly structured by social categories. These categories are tied up with how we communicate, and how we treat others, or are treated by others – and indeed how we treat the world – but let’s leave that last point for another discussion.
One way of telling what someone is likely to mean, or do, is to categorise them. Some people have the right to give orders for instance, you might be expected to speak in a different way to an older (or younger) person or a person of another gender. If your child says “there’s an alien behind the tool shed” you might interpret it differently to the way you would interpret it if said by your commanding officer. The meaning changes with the context, or the framing, and in this case the framing is provided by the identity category of the person who is speaking (in that situation).
Let’s begin online, to make the importance of this a bit clearer. My experience online suggests that it’s quite hard to actually understand what anybody’s saying because you very rarely engage in much of an interactive conversation like we’re having. You make a text and then somebody responds to that text. Generally, there’s no kind of interaction, outside the text, that helps us to check meaning. I’m not hearing the tone of your voice, your grunts and nods which indicate if you understand, or disagree, or are getting offended when I’m not intending that and so on. I’m not perceiving your facial expressions or body language. Emojis are not a good substitute. Online, you emit, and people you might not even know are listening, might respond. So I can’t build my meaning as well as I do, in interaction, and the texts we offer on the internet are generally not that developed anyway. We also often do not know the people we are interacting with and have no history with them, or real knowledge of them or of what they are likely to think.
In effect, because of this lack of cues and the sheer volume of messages you may need to be able to resolve meaning pretty quickly. We need what people call ‘framing’, to help provide the context that gives a statement meaning and history. In this case, we usually frame by identity category; that is by who we think the other person is.
A common way of framing in this manner, is what we can call ‘political framing’. In other words, people classify, or categorise, themselves and others as belonging to a group with a particular kind of political orientation and that gives them some ‘knowledge’ of what the other might be thinking on most public issues. It narrows the range of possible meanings the listener has to apply, and that helps them resolve the meaning, and get on with the communication. Not necessarily accurately or harmoniously. Accuracy becomes less important than intensity and speed. We might even think that because we categorise a person in a certain political way, that they have nothing sensible to say on a particular subject. We might dismiss everything they say as stupid, or brainwashed – you know, the ‘sheeple’ response. We rarely spend much time exploring what the other might mean, or understand. We may not even care because they mean little to us.
The argument here is that the internet or Internet styles of communication have tended to intensify the ways that people classify themselves and classify others, to aid communication resolution – but that mode of communication resolution may not actually help good communication. Often, our modes of ordering fail, and even generate the disorder we fear. However, there might be certain payoffs which overwhelm any realisation that the techniques are not working, or indeed making things worse.
Interviewer: So how does this work politically?
JM: This factor can be quite useful politically. For instance, some media organisations like Fox News have been quite explicit that one of the ways that they keep people watching them is to tell their viewers that they cannot trust anybody else. People on Fox are the only people who tell the truth and they are pro-Republican or whatever (or possibly they define themselves by what they are not. They are not ‘radical’, ‘looney’, ‘socialist’ Democrats). So that people who classify themselves Republican, and who end up watching Fox News, tend to get very nervous about news from outside of that domain, because they have been told constantly that the rest of the world is being deceived and is mislead or even becoming un-American. Fox, to a large extent, tells them what they want to hear, that they are right, so its comfortable. Of course, if they accept all this is true, then it explains to them why other people might disagree with them. Those disagreeable people are disagreeing, not because Fox is misrepresenting reality, or Republicans are not working in their interests, but because those other people have been deceived, or whatever, and those other people are too stupid to work out the truth.
In those terms, people who disagree are automatically ‘sheeple’ – ill informed, obedient non-thinkers – not themselves of course; that could never happen. Fox’s message is that Democrats are your enemy, and Democrats are immoral, and Democrats lie all the time, particularly Democrat politicians. There is a binary contrast being made between the ‘sensible us’ and the ‘deluded and dangerous them’. The more that people only hear news which confirms what they believe, the more strongly news which disagrees with what they hear looks odd.
The process is reinforced as it makes an effective marketing strategy; it keeps your audience involved and watching, and if you can actually stop the audience listening to other sources of news, then they become more likely to stick with your news and that can increase your audience size and loyalty, and satisfy your sponsors.
It also keeps your audience involved with the station. And if you keep them emotionally active, angry and so on, they’re more likely to be excited and loyal, and they are less likely to check up about those they are angry about, or explore alternate news, particularly news from the centre. Obviously, politically, this can help to keep people in power and so on, because questioning those people involves disloyalty to the ‘information group’ that Fox creates. Think of the soft interviews that President Trump got on Fox, week after week – this draws audiences, gave Fox influence and power (the President may have received most of his information from Fox) and so on.
Nowadays there are people way to the right of Fox who are using similar techniques against Fox, because they know their audience has already been scared off ‘mainstream media’ -or media which is centrist or mildly right – they say Fox is ‘mainstream,’ it’s ‘deep state’ or whatever, because one journalist called a state for Biden and not Trump, or because there are people not praising Trump all the time. This helps build the audience of these further right stations up and satisfies their sponsors. So it becomes a self-reinforcing mechanism.
This can be a general process, not just one that happens on the right, it is just been more obvious on the right over the last 20 to 40 years. It also shows people the danger of not sticking in their category or not thinking or behaving as members of their category are supposed to behave and think. If they talk to the outsiders they can be expelled, exiled from their friends and people like them. This is particularly difficult for most humans as we are strongly social, and most of us depend on others for survival. The Right in the US uses the term RINO (Republicans in name only) as a term of abuse; this is used against Republicans who don’t always follow the hardliners of the party or who need to be punished, or threatened with exile, for communicating with people outside the group, or suggesting compromise, or whatever, for the good of the country.
People also tend to find that those who are exemplary of their group are more persuasive than exemplary members of an outgroup, or members of their own group who are classified as deviant. So again the process is self-reinforcing.
I would say that over the last 40 years, this kind of self classification and interpretation mechanism has massively intensified, but it was first used in ordinary media to get, keep and persuade audiences as both a commercial tool and a tool of power. It then became a standard way of information processing and interpretation on the Internet, and is reinforced by media and politics. It became a universal habit.
I suspect that people self often classify themselves as virtuous and other people (especially outgroups) as less virtuous. This might be normal and Fox and others are playing on this, but the intensity of the classifications, and the separation of categories leads people to disagree with the enemy on politics much more strongly than they did 40 years ago. And they tend to be much ruder about it, more prone to anger and so on; all of which helps break good communication.
Interviewer: So just to clarify, so you say that media, social media has made these attitudes more intense. Because we cannot communicate to each other properly. As if it was face-to-face.
JM: Yeah. I think the process was reinforced, because not long after this began there was a shift to online communication. There’s now so much communication that happens online, that its normal. There is so much information online that you need to be able to filter it quickly to make sense of it, and we let others filter this for us. There’s no real time for reflection.
Interviewer: Do you believe that these attitudes have been around since the beginning of human history, or has it started at a certain point?
JM: I think that it’s happened ever since language came around, because language involves a process of categorisation. Linguistic categories group different things together to try to make sense of them.
And also, of course, human beings always have to interact with other human beings. Our individuality comes out of our learning and interactions with others, both people we identify with and those we identify against. There are no functioning cultural human beings without other functioning cultural human beings and functional categories. We borrow our language from other people. We borrow our ideas from other people, and construct those ideas in interaction with other people (often including dead people through books). Sure we modify that language and ideas. But nevertheless, without those people, we would not really be able to think or act properly because we wouldn’t learn as much. I doubt we, as lone individuals, could invent language without learning language from other people. So I think that these sorts of processes go way back to the origins of humanity.
These processes probably become more of a problem when you get large scale societies, because if you live in a small scale society, the serious ‘not-we’ is something that you may not encounter very often, or only on special occasions. You might worry about them, but its not a big deal. That does not mean everyone is ‘we’ in the same way of course, but the ‘not-we’ might not be an enemy, just different. Whereas in a large scale society, you have to encounter the not ‘we’ all the time, its in your face.
There is an argument that the invention of the novel, which obviously happened in different cultures at different times across the world, gave people the imaginative experience of actually having to empathise with people who were ‘not we’ in order to read the book. This kind of empathy can also be enabled through other shared forms of media and newspapers, and helped the build-up of a sense of ‘nation’ which previously didn’t exist. This empathy helped people to classify more or less everybody who lived in their country of being part of the ‘we’. And yes, of course, this identity could become focused, you know, like the ‘we’ of your family, then move to the ‘we’ of your local community, the ‘we’ of your religion, your class, your education, your gender or whatever.
These categories can overlap with each other, which make personal identity so complicated – lots of different ‘we’s that intersect to make up your sense of identity, your sense of your ‘I’, your individuality. This is what intersectionality theory points to. People can choose (to some extent) whether they focus on the categories they share in common, or the categories which differentiate them, or make them different. Black women in the US can share parts of the ‘women experience’ with white women in the US, but they can also be separated by skin colour, or class, or whatever. You can choose to focus on the commonalities at some times, and the differences at others, which seems realistic if everyone gets what is being done, or you can join together or split completely.
Obviously, again, you have earlier examples of intensification of the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In 1930s Germany, Hitler and the Nazis were able to convince many people that Jewish people could be categorised as subhuman and not categorised along with everyone else – they were supposedly completely different to normal Germans. This is intensifying a particular categorical difference and making it absolutely dominant, so there is no longer an intersecting ‘we’. Jewish people were not Germans, and possibly something similar is happening in the US today. The other political side are not Americans…. not humans really, just sheeple or demons – ready to be slaughtered. It’s a basic step to dehumanisation.
This had a historical and social backdrop, which made the distinction easier. Germany and Europe had a history of anti-Semitism, almost certainly based on religious group-making, while other countries had histories of slavery or colonialism which boosted other forms of racism and separation. However, the difference was intensified, when there is a possibility, at that time, it could have gone the other way and largely faded out.
One explanation as to why this politicised separation was so effective, is because many Germans, especially (but not only) the middle class, faced massive survival anxiety because of economic collapse. They faced the challenges of popular communism; they faced descent into the precarious poor, if they were not already there. This was truly frightening. Jewish people were largely not that influential, they were a minority, they were also easily associated with finance, and hence relatively easy to blame as the cause of Germany’s problems, even though most Jewish people faced exactly the same problems, of encroaching precariousness, as everyone else. Finally, big business (including people like American Henry Ford) funded the Nazis to save themselves from the Communists, and shift the blame elsewhere, from their own prosperity. Hitler promised to make Germany great again, and the Nazis were able to intensify the categories until it appeared Jews were nothing like ‘real Germans’, and the party could strip away whatever power individual Jewish people had, to render them even less powerful, and with even less ability to resist. And of course, the party was not afraid to use organised violence against people they classified as outsiders.
One of the dangers of categorising people as completely ‘other’ is that it’s a very short step to move from that, to taking that they are not human, and that we can do anything we like to them.
Interviewer: So what exactly happened around 40 years ago?
JM: Well, I think it started off as a political movement. My hypothesis is that during the 1980s, a lot of political momentum was generated around the idea of free markets and basically giving corporations special status and leadership, with the justification that everybody would rise in prosperity, everybody’s liberty would increase and so on, through handing power to markets. This was reinforced by the late 80s collapse of communism, which meant there was no longer any probable threat from workers rising in protest. The model and hope of alternate government was dead.
The rise in prosperity and liberty that was promised basically didn’t happen and, I’d argue, it can’t happen because capitalism is not just about economics but it is a mode of power and political control. In these ‘free market’ systems, corporate profit actually becomes the governing value of government and nation, and anything that gets in its way, has to be abolished.
One of the ways that the supporters of those kind of movements kept themselves in power was to deliberately try and set up an ‘us’ and ‘them’ set of categories between ‘we good people’ who believe in this truth about liberty and markets, and ‘those idiotic, evil people’ who are trying to maintain tyranny and oppression by opposing this truth (even though you can hardly call the 60s and 70s times of tyranny and oppression). In American media in the late 80s, you suddenly get people like Rush Limbaugh and so on, appearing, and their news programs are basically devoted to slandering and mocking people who disagree with this Republican ideology, as idiots or devils. They begin the culture wars and pretend that the outgroup are sheep, or even subhuman. The message is you can’t believe the others – they are bad people, really bad people.
This caught on. Being abusive gets called entertainment. It makes those people in the ‘we’ feel good about themselves, and gives them a scapegoat to blame for everything that is going wrong. And let us be clear, neoliberalism generates a lot of ‘going wrong’ for ordinary people; declining wages and working conditions for one. Most people suddenly find themselves in an economically precarious situation. Not as bad as pre-Nazi Germany perhaps, but still threatening, by comparison with what has gone before.
Interviewer: So in terms of politics, how do you think it functions in politics?
JM: Once you’ve got this kind of dynamic going, it means people will tend to support their side even when they do radically stupid, or dishonest, things. For example, when I was younger, some of the behavior of our current Australian government would not have been acceptable to anyone. Things like the whole series of scandals around Angus Taylor, or the sports rorts affair (which appears to reach right up to the Coalition leadership), or other hand outs of taxpayers’ cash to Coalition cronies. In my youth, the people responsible for these scandals would have been forced to take responsibility and resign. But the Coalition have a large body of media who will support them whatever they do, or which will argue that you cannot agree with their critics because its not strategic to give the other side any victories, and if you do you’re not one of ‘us’ – not a real conservative. So they can get away with it.
If you agree with the Coalition then you will let them get through it without any real problem – they are the ‘we’ – or you will pretend that there is no problem, or that they are just doing what everyone does. Attacking Taylor would be attacking the ‘we’ and hence the ‘I’. However, it would not be the same if the other side had acted similarly – that would be a scandal, which people would have to pay for. Likewise, I’m sure that if Clinton had behaved anything like Trump, Republicans would not be excusing her, like they excuse Trump. They would see the problems very clearly, and they would be furious.
We have got to the state where parties nowadays, can spend time just attacking the opposition rather than actually putting forward any policies. They seem to be relying largely upon group identity, and personal identity, to get them elected. Indeed, in certain cases, being explicit about their policies might induce opposition from those in their group-categories.
Interviewer: During the 2016 elections in America. Was this also present?
JM: I think so very, very strongly. This kind of thing, was almost the whole of what Trump was putting forward all the time. Anything that criticised him was fake news. His opposition (Hillary Clinton) was from the ‘liberal elite’, with no ability to relate to ordinary Americans. She was a criminal. She was evil. He would keep the rapist and murdering Mexicans (‘not us’) out, and do wonderful but largely unspecified things. He was a Republican who had been successful in markets and his group were the only ones who believed in America etc. All of that kind of stuff was very, very pronounced, as was the idea that the supposed liberal intelligentsia was totally contemptuous towards ordinary Americans, who should vote for Trump as a result. Some of that may even have seemed true because people on the Democrat side did talk about rednecks and deplorables and so on (even if Clinton’s remark about deplorables was taken out of context). So, yes, the polarisation was intense and it was inculcated by political leaders for their own purposes. Once you saw Trump as like you, a victimised outsider with good intentions, a normal but supremely talented guy, you didn’t have to worry so much about policy, because whatever he did would be the right thing. You voted for your sense of ‘we’ and your self-identity – and why not? No one else was doing you any good.
And Fox News, the Murdoch empire and various other people used these processes to help boost the policies they liked while not reporting, diminishing, or distorting the anti-Trump stories , while the less biased media was really unable, or unwanting, to pose a counter narrative.
There are lots of stories about Trump which never got any traction – like his alleged rape of a 13 year old girl at Jeffrey Epstein’s place. Judges thought the evidence good enough to go to court just before the Trump/Clinton election, but it apparently was not considered a real story, and after he became president it was withdrawn and the woman said she had been threatened, but that wasn’t considered a story either. I don’t think the story would have been left alone if it had involved a Democrat but, obviously, that can’t be proven.
Interviewer: So in terms of going back to social media and technology, but more in depth. What role does it have in this?
JM: As I said before, this kind of hard, ready and simple political categorisation helps lower the ambiguities of communication and gives people certainty, even if the certainty is incorrect. It also makes things really exciting because you’re at hyper-pitch all the time. You know, its ‘us’ versus the ‘evil empire’. People try to gain points with their own groups by being aggressive towards outsiders. People troll outsiders, for the pleasure of asserting their own political persuasion and showing themselves how righteous they are, and what creeps the others are. Again, it becomes that kind of hyper charging of categories to assert dominance and virtue, and to assert these other people are crap and we can abuse them with pleasure. And of course, as they reject ‘us’ because we are so rude, that reinforces our hatred for them
Interviewer: An article I read said one of the causes of tribalism was the emergence of populist and nationalist movements as well as growing economic inequalities.
JM: Well, this is another place where the idea of tribalism obscures what’s happening. It is more useful to talk about how categories work, because what is nationalism other than a particular set of ‘we’ categories in motion? These categories are defining your own identity. Nationalism says people of this appearance, or this behavior, or this descent, or whatever, belong together as a group. That’s a form of categorization. It’s saying: if you are real Hungarian or a real English person or a real Australian, then you will belong in these types of categories and have these types of properties and characteristics. You will belong together with people of the sort of similar characteristics and people who don’t have those characteristics do not belong with you. And those others are, when the intensity is low, just other people, but when the intensity is high, they are evil people and they should be expelled or blamed for whatever is going wrong.
Nationalists, need people who are not of the nation to reinforce the nation, hence Trump’s need to attack Mexicans (although he denies it) and why he was so threatened by Black Lives Matter. He could not say, ‘we’ need to sort out this problem. ‘We’ need to talk. It was “those rioters” those disorderly wicked people.
When you get to that level of intensity of categorization ‘populism’ just means basically going along with that set of ‘we’ and ‘them’ categories.
I don’t really know what else people are talking about when they’re saying populism. There’s often no kind of intellectual arguments or theories behind these things, or very superficial ones. But, it does not matter; it’s about this kind of identification of yourself with a group of other people who are being opposed, or oppressed, by another group of people who are identified as different and evil. Frequently this separation is magnified by the nationalists or popularists, trying to argue that the negative outgroups are oppressing the virtuous ingroups, to increase the hostility, even when this is objectively unlikely. It sometimes seems like the Australian government is trying to persuade us that homeless and displaced refugees are powerful and evil figures, bent on our destruction.
People don’t have to do any analysis once these categories are established, and they are being used to interpret what other people are saying and what your people are saying. You don’t need anything else anymore. You have a political movement. You have the ‘we’ and the ‘them’, in escalating opposition. The greater the hostility, the more likely that neither side will listen to the other, or attempt to bridge differences. Name-calling and so on, separates the groups even further, and makes the disputes even less likely to be resolved peacefully.
So nationalisms and populisms, create behaviours, and take advantage of behaviours, which boost strong categorisations, positive for the in group and negative for the outgroups, and try to encourage people to be hostile to the outgroups – which reinforces the process.
A growing sense of loss of people’s survival security may help people to look for a scapegoat, which they can be led to find in a (usually despised) outgroup.
Populism is felt to be the saviour of the nation state, but its actually the breakdown of the nation state. All these people who we used to tolerate and think of as part of the ‘us’, are no longer categorised as us. They are something else inferior – ‘sheeple’ again.
Interviewer: I mentioned the economic factors and inequalities.
JM: You did, sorry. You are right to draw attention to the economic factors, and to growing inequalities. When people’s survival is threatened (and people’s survival, and familiar lives, are being threatened by the apparent path of the economy, this is one reason why they want the US to be great again), they don’t always act rationally. They look for quick simple blame mechanisms, and things they can do. In this case; Blame the other side, the bad people – its their fault. Those on this path see the other side as worse than they probably are, as more powerful than they are and so on. It makes sense. Attack the bad people elect someone you identify with, and all will be well.
On top of this, people are probably aware that scientists say climate change is happening, and getting worse, even if they don’t understand it, or the follow misinformation. They might have some experience of that change in terms of weather, storms and drought, so even if they had rather it wasn’t happening, they have a sense of strangeness. And they know that people appear to threaten their normal way of living by wanting to act against climate change – that is what they are told by people they respect and identify with – so that is a worry too. And they can blame the bad outgroup people again for wanting that change.
Interviewer: So are you saying all this is deliberately engineered by bad people?
JM: That is my feeling. But that is a good question. What we are talking about is a natural process, that we can all fall into if we don’t take care and are not aware of how it works. And even if we are aware we might fall into it, in certain conditions, there is no guarantee we get free of our automisms.
Interviewer: What do you think are the relevant conditions.
JM: That’s difficult. But let me try and list some:
- Survival crisis, often seems to activate hard categories – as we tend to look for others to blame. I don’t know if this is cultural or universal.
- Conditions that break empathy. I tend to think empathy is the basis of constructive morality. It allows you to imagine being the other, with sympathy. Instead of seeing say an unfortunate person, or a victim, as an outcast or as evil, you can empathise with them. You think, that could be happening to me. I should find out what help could be needed. I need to be ‘just’ rather than take as much revenge as possible.
- Empathy also suggests other people are interesting, rather than just threatening or like me.
- If we break down categories into oppositions, rather than recognise them as hordes of intersections, then we create differences which are sometimes unreal. Even though I might differ from you in politics, we are similar in being human, in being Australian, in speaking a language in common, in being people who are trying to understand how things work. This recognition of similarity and difference can help to keep us linked rather than just placed in opposition.
- If we tend not to interact with others, or the interactions tend to be constrained in some way (as they often are online and casually), then it may become hard to empathise. It is hard to empathise with abstractions. Interaction also tends to remind us that other people, despite their differences are humans. However, sometimes interactions can bring differences to the fore, and make them more visible and troubling – so its a delicate balance.
- If we stop sharing information, or get our information from really different sources, then we can have radically different ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Those ways of understanding may share little in common. Making the other really evil, is easier if we don’t have close ties to the other and we apparently don’t share world views, and that reduces the possibility of empathy or category softening.
- With this hardening of categories, many people will try to show how they are good members of the group by really emphasising their group loyalty and commitment – this helps makes the groups even more distinct, but may help the people gain status or power. It also encourages people to display this behaviour, because it lessens their chance of being expelled, and the consequences of being expelled get worse and worse, because the others seem so evil.
- Obviously the last three factors could be made worse by the internet becoming one of our main ways of communicating and finding things out. We can be channeled into only interacting with people we define as being like us, or who share the information we share. So the others really do become incomprehensible strangers. They really become complete outsiders. Social media sites and search engines try to make finding what we want to hear easier to find, so by attempting to make order, they make the disorder of separation even worse; they remove the accidental possibility of finding information which is foreign to us.
- The internet also makes it worse because this separation of publics, leads to people from the other side thinking they will have fun by grouping together and trolling the others. This helps convince the others that the raiders’ side really are dickheads, and the raiders get to see the others all upset and vulnerable, so they can say they have had a victory.
- In these situations, then politics will tend to become more separatist and binary, people will go along with leaders because the consequences of not going along seem so bad. It does not have to be politics, it could be chariot racing groups as in Byzantium, Protestant or Catholic in Christianity and so on; whatever have become major identity groups and self classifications, through the processes of history.
There’s probably many more factors. I guess people should think about this if they want to.
Interviewer: I saw in this book by a French sociologist, he said that humans are, quote unquote, “homo duplex”. Which means that we both have a setting to be more ‘we’ and groupish, and another setting which can be more individual. Do you agree with this?
JM: Well, the relationship between, say, the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, is very complicated, because one of the ways that you know who you are, is by who you categorize yourself with.
You know, like ‘I’m an intellectual’. ‘I’m a university person’. ‘I like this kind of politics.’ ‘I’m not very sociable’, ‘I’m a guy’. ‘I’m in this kind of stage of life’. ‘My parents were British working class’ or whatever. I have all of these sorts of categories and, as we said above, these characteristics intersect – some of them give me some degrees of privilege and obligation, some don’t. They put me in a range of relationships with others. And those ways of categorizing myself are the way that I give myself identity. And I think that’s pretty general.
So, because of this, the ‘I’ is always a kind of ‘we’ of some sort. But at the same time, the ‘I’ has the potential to be different from everybody else. I’ve learnt all kinds of things from different people. No one has had exactly the same experience as me, or as you. We are all different, but we are also similar in some way or another. We are social creatures and we are individual creatures. We may even learn individuality from others because we admire and would like to be like someone else, or some group of other people, or fit in with some group.
In many ways, individuality itself is a social category, a set of social instructions which we carry out in part, or rebel against in part.
There’s the Monty Python sketch were a whole crowd is chanting in unison “we are all individuals” and some guy shouts out by himself “I’m not.” And that is obviously not an approved thing to say, while claiming individuality is really high on the list of socially approved things to say in our culture.
Another interesting thing about categories is that the ‘we’ category is differentiated; you can usually tell the difference between you and other people that you categorize in that level, they might be small differences but they seem real, but the others in the outgroups look to be pretty much identical, even if they appear radically different to other people in that group.
Almost whenever you hear political conversations, you will find people saying something like “all those people, they all do this, they all believe this”. “All Democrats are…. All Republicans are…” And it’s often not true because there’s heaps of variation in the ‘they’, as much as in the ‘us,’ but people do not see it as easily, when the categories become hard.
The point is that people are never entirely an individual and they’re never entirely collective, the two dynamics are going on simultaneously. And that, again, comes out of our language, and language usage, because of the way that we categorize people.
Interviewer: Going back to what you said about the example of Hitler and what he did to the Jews. Do you think that if we become too oriented in categorizing people it can actually become the ‘“other” can become like dehumanized?
JM: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, again, this is something you will see in an ordinary debate. I mean, the amount of abuse online and the amount of people saying, oh, you’re just a Republican idiot, you all think…. or you’re just a Democrat idiot, you all think…. or you’re a Liberal idiot or whatever; that kind of dehumanizing, that refusal to see that whatever your ‘they’ category is, it’s varied, leads to dehumanization. You dismiss them all as idiots or evil or whatever. It doesn’t take very long before that kind of division overwhelms the categories which actually link you together. People don’t think they are all our fellow humans, or even fellow members of our country, they think they are Republicans or Democrats, Coalition or Labor, or whatever.
Interviewer: Can we also not just see dehumanization, but this intense categorization on Twitter and its call-out culture as well as cancel culture?
JM: Yeah. It’s basically the same kind of thing. where you’re saying that if you belong to a particular category, then you have to have these particular sets of characteristics and behaviours, and you had better have them perfectly. And if you don’t have these particular sets of characteristics, even if you are only missing one of them, then you do not to belong to the category.
The point needs to be made here is this is not a calm thinking things out, its a response. You don’t think “I categorise this person this way, therefore they are likely blah”. It’s “this person is an A. They are blah” Your categorisation becomes your reality. You feel it, possibly deep down. When the categorisation is particularly hard and bad, then you may feel revulsion when the person opens their mouth, or is seen. If that happens, then you really have been programmed….
One of the things that’s adds to this self-deception is that we tend to think that ‘items’ or people which belong in categories all belong in the same way. But in fact, human categories are both composed of items that are similar in many different ways, and simultaneously, different in many different ways. And sometimes they’re actually quite different. And so, yes, all of this can be a form of dehumanization, of saying that ‘they people’ are not real members of the ‘we’ of the good people. Because the ‘we’ is always the good people. People assume that because Trump has all kinds of features which might make him a good example of the ‘we’ group, he actually has all of them – like being trustworthy, being concerned, being hard done by, being religious, etc.
Interviewer: So is there such a thing as tribals?
JM: If you must use that term, it arises out of categorizing those who belong to my group as good with all these other positive categories (to some extent). And then all those who belong to the outgroups have all these negative categories. There are only a few overlapping categories which allow us to have anything in common. It doesn’t have to be that binary. But when you get those hard category boundaries, phrased in terms of hostility, it tends to become binary like that. That then becomes category bias, shall we say? People don’t talk across categories, they dismiss those in devalued categories and so on. Relationships tend to get hostile, which reinforces the hardness of the categories and the devaluation of people we class in the outgroup categories.
I don’t really know why we call this ‘tribal’ when not all humans who live in what we call tribes, are necessarily like this… They can have good relationships with their neighbours, and with different kinds of people. As I said at the beginning, calling this process ‘tribal’ tends to hide the kind of social, political and linguistic dynamics involved. It makes it seem natural, when it can be being engineered.
Interviewer: Is there any way out of here?
JM: I hope so, but I’m not sure. If we want to get back to being an inclusive nation or planet, then we have to be prepared to cultivate empathy towards the other members of our nation or planet, cultivate the intersecting categories, and stop our main categories being so binary. We need to see how ‘they’ are like ‘us’, how ‘they’ respond like ‘us’ or suffer like us, how they have values like us (even if slightly different).
This is difficult when we have politicised media that is devoted to smearing the others, but we can try. We can cultivate empathy for others. We can try and set up groups that tend to avoid the tropes of separation. And once we understand how the dynamics of separation works, then it becomes a bit easier. For example, one of my friends set up a group to discuss science and music, in which politics is banned, because she was so bored of the endless name calling and separation, and she wanted to provide a place in which people can just be together. That’s a good start. We need a lot more places where we can share our intersections without only emphasising differences. We can try to reach out to others, we know, across the divide; this is difficult and it may fail, but its probably worthwhile.
To repeat we need to stop making our main categories appear to be binary exclusives. We can do this by emphasising the intersections and commonalities, or by looking for the invisible third category. There is always not just two opposing categories, there are always people outside that framework, so lets not reduce ‘the third’ to one of the other two. For example in US politics, there are ‘Pro-corporates’, ‘Conservatives’, and ‘Liberals’ at least. Pro-corporates and Conservatives act as if they are on the same side but they are not really. We could also think of Republicans, Democrats and Greens – Greens usually know that they are not really on the side of the more humanistic neoliberal party, but its all they have. Its easier in Australia because we have a number of effective small parties in Parliament, but it is worthwhile resisting the attempts to split us all between Right and Left.
Trump once said there are good people on both sides. Ok he was being hypocritical, because he was implying neo-nazis are good, but could apparently never bring himself to say there were any good people protesting for Black Lives Matter – only his extremist supporters attacking peaceful protestors could be given the benefit of the doubt. However, if the principle is taken properly and not just for rhetorical purposes then its worthwhile keeping in mind. There might not be that many ‘good’ neo-nazis (given that no one can be naïve about what the Nazis did) but there might be some, and there are plenty of good people on the mainstream right, and their are plenty of good people on the left, and maybe that goodness is worth recognising? Maybe recognition of that probable fact, can break the hardness of the categories?
We can treat other side politicians as if they were not always the enemy. I recently interviewed a local politician, he was a bit evasive, but he kept saying that he saw his job as getting people to talk to each other across the divide. I don’t know whether other people trusted that was what he was trying to do, or whether he was genuine. I can’t know that, but I can know it’s a worthy ambition, and I support him in principle, and see what happens. So far he seems to be ‘walking the talk’. I find that kind of moving.
We can also decide we won’t watch news shows, where they never say anything nice about the other side, and they name-call and shout a lot, fulminate in culture wars irrelevancies, and engage in obvious dehumanisation. We are being manipulated by these people, even if we think we are not, and even if they don’t think they are trying to manipulate us.
Don’t give up on other people, and it does not matter if they agree with us on everything. The important thing is to keep the channels open. I, personally, may not do that very well, so I know its hard, but its is one of the few hopes we have, and even the slightest move to break the barriers may help.
It’s a fragile hope, but its worth thinking about in more detail.
Interviewer: Thanks, that’s about all I want to ask. It was interesting.
JM: It was good to talk. Thank you.
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