Tribalism: The good, the bad, the possible
Liz Seymour’s essay on her anarchist commune, which I quoted in a previous posting, included this:
If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60’s or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.
How we were “meant to live” is important in the context of how humans have adapted, or not adapted, to modern society. Seymour’s reference to the “miniature tribe” is also key. Tribes have both advantages and disadvantages. As portions of the globe struggle with clashes between what are typically described as tribal identities on the one hand and universalism on the other, it’s easy to point to tribalism as dangerous, narrow-minded, and better off extinct than explored.
It’s not clear to me, though, that this outcome is inevitable, and in any case Seymour had in mind not the distorted tribal systems surviving today but, as she says, our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I’m not fully up to speed on recent debates about the primitivism-anarchism connection or lack of connection, but I do think the size at which a community become something else, something worse, is worth exploring.
I recently discovered that my 1985 article on anarchism, psychology, and the tragedy of the commons is cited in Wikipedia as suggesting an ideal community size of about 150 people. I was actually citing Julian Edney’s use of the number, but trying to figure out how best to structure communities made sense to me then and makes sense now.
Aside: I just searched for Edney, found this recent book Greed. Sounds like it’s worth looking at.
