Homo sapiens is the most social of species. Not only do we not live in isolation, as so many creatures of the earth do, we fine-tune our cohabitation of the planet far beyond anything even the closest social runner-up species can manage.
The vast majority of mammals extant today limit their time with their own species to child-rearing periods. Once the young are old enough to be on their own, they’re, well, on their own. They proceed to spend the rest of their days pursuing food and sex, dependent only upon themselves.
Not so, human beings – or our close cousins, the chimpanzee and bonobo, who also live in social tribes. We stick together birth-to-death – in families, in communities, in cities, in nations. With the rarest exceptions, we live our lives in the constant company of our own kind.
The thing is... until very recently in cosmic time, that binding-together into tribes has always been a randomized thing. Like the chimpanzee and bonobo, we would remain with the social tribe into which we were born, or at most would migrate to a closely-neighboring tribe (as human females in prehistory tended to do). We didn’t really choose; we simply spent our lives sequestered with the people who happened to be around when we were born.
Then came a warm earth. And agriculture. And civilization. And an end to the confines of our migratory tribal existence. We started setting up shop on fertile land next to rivers and staying there. Thousands of roving human tribes became thousands of small communities. And it became possible, even efficient, to let the communities grow, with tribes often joining together.
Put simply, we acquired a power our primate cousins lack: the ability to create new tribes, differentiated by whatever criteria we pleased. And so we invented religion. And politics. And other great progressive social boons.
We segregate into tribal clusters over favorite football teams. Favorite music. Marvel v. DC. Star Trek v. Star Wars.
Within politics and religion – our most deeply-invested fake tribes - we can create subdivisions within tribes, based on the most minute, inconsequential discriminator. There are, for instance, hundreds of versions of Christianity to be found around the globe today, but the subtribes are so nuanced that one Christian tribe declares another Christian tribe Hell-bound over the nitpickiest particulars of the baptism ritual. In politics, we see that there are many, many flavors of tribe: Business Republicans vs. MAGA Republicans; Progressive Democrats vs. Neoliberal Democrats.
Why do we do this? Why do human beings cluster together into such breathtakingly constricted, narrowly-defined groups?
It’s simple: it is much easier, socially, to be around people who reflect ourselves back at us. We expend much less emotional and social energy maintaining relationships with those whose worldviews we share, and whose emotions are sated in the same ways as ours.
Put another way, we don’t really define the faux social tribes of humanity according to intellectual or cultural distinctions; we really segregate to surround ourselves with people who are easy to be around. Ancient human tribes didn’t have that luxury; they were too busy surviving together, so learning to live within an emotionally diverse group was simply an essential part of existence.
And so we see people huddling together based on personality traits and emotional responses, without even realizing it:
The people who are most fearful. Folks who are frequently uneasy or uncomfortable with the state of the world, who feel easily threatened and are highly sensitive to dangers real or imagined, find those feelings intolerable in isolation; they experience great comfort in the presence of those who see the same threats and dangers – a validation of their wary state, as well as a strength-in-numbers response.
The people who are most curious. The hungry-minded find seem emotional satisfaction in the process of discovery, whether intellectual or creative; and while such needs can (and most often are) pursued individually, the sharing of discoveries among the like-minded curious is emotionally exciting to many.
The people who are angriest. Of a piece with the Most Fearful above, those who are angriest have an understanding, however passive it might be, that anger requires justification; there is a social cost to its expression. The validation of others angered by the same things provides not only justification but emotional satisfaction, regardless of the subject of the anger.
The people who are most creative. Of a piece with the Most Curious above, creative people tend to huddle together in community for several reasons. Shared worldview is one; they tend to see everything around them in terms of possibility, and it is emotionally stimulating to feel that sense of possibility in others. They are also dopamine-deprived, scooping stimulation from the environment around them – including other people – at every opportunity, and communion with those who share that deficit is often a highly constructive stimulation in itself.
The people who are most well-informed. Some people choose to face the world as well-prepared for it as possible, and go out of their way to learn all they can – about how the world really works, about history, about humanity, about current events, about culture. This sort of hungry-mindedness isn’t necessarily curiosity- or creativity-driven, as above (although it certainly can be); it is a matter of feeling emotional satisfaction in understanding. It is natural to feel a kindred satisfaction in regular association with others who have achieved a similar plateau of understanding, and often those associations reinforce the comprehension that brings them about – iron sharpening iron.
The people who are most ill-informed. Conversely, there are many people who base their understanding of the world and humanity on the emotional resonance they experience from those around them, facts aside. These people are comforted in having a worldview provided for them, relieving from the burden of having to construct one on their own, a worldview that exists primarily to provide an emotional experience, as opposed to facilitating their adaptation to society; and association with those who share it gives them validation they are denied by those who measure their worldviews against objective reality.
It’s no great effort to map the most prominent tribes around us onto these deeper groups, is it? So easy, of course, that we won’t bother doing it here. The point is that when we assess the tribes around us from this point of view, realizing what’s really motivating their clustering-together, we can more easily see why they choose those tribes and how little reason has to do with those choices. It’s an empathic step to take this view, boosting our own tolerance, and also gives us a nudge toward being a little more adventurous ourselves, in seeking out those who aren’t quite like us, tribally.
We’ll never have the experience of living in a tribe that is strictly selected by nature, as our deep ancestors did, and that’s a shame; they necessarily had people skills that were orders of magnitude greater than ours, and – we can reasonably suspect – much richer community.
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