Tribalism & Cosmopolitanism

I am a cosmopolitan. By cosmopolitan I mean not only that I have a stamp-filled passport or that I have lived in different countries and regularly share stories with friends in foreign languages across many time zones. My cosmopolitanism also means more than the fact that I feel at home in a shul, have attended weddings in churches of multiple denominations, and celebrated Ramadan in a mosque in Jerusalem. Yes, one sense of being a cosmopolitan is that we take a meaningful interest in the practices and cultures of people who are different from ourselves. As a cosmopolitan, there is a sense of being at home anywhere—which can also mean, of course, that one is at home nowhere.

I also deeply value my tribal connections. This means that I take seriously my particular identity and citizenship and celebrate certain deeply felt attachments. I am a New Yorker, a Bardian, an Arendtian, and an American. To say I'm an American doesn't mean I'm a nationalist in the sense that George Orwell defines Nationalism: the "habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests." Rather, I'm more closely identified with what Orwell calls a patriot: I have a "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life," one which I believe to be one of the best in the world, but I have no wish to force my way of life on other people— Orwell says the patriot believes their people are the best in the world, which on some days is more than I would say.

The word tribe has a bad name in certain progressive and intellectual circles today—indeed some speakers at this conference were annoyed that my conference description portrayed tribalism in a non-negative light. For these thinkers, tribalism has the aura of prejudice, nationalism, and even racism. There are, of course, plenty of examples of racist tribalism, what Hannah Arendt calls pseudo mystical tribal nationalism. Tribalism as racism elevates one's own people as superior to others who must be assimilated, expelled, or eliminated to solve social and political problems for which they are imagined to be the cause. Such Tribalism denies the very possibility of the idea of a common humanity of man.

There is, however, a positive and redeemable aspect of being part of a tribe that goes beyond the simple fact that we humans all evolved from tribal groups. There is a human need for what Sebastian Junger calls a group-founded solidarity. Members of a tribe, for example soldiers in a foxhole and coal miners trapped for days in a collapsed mine, share a solidarity born of having suffered together as a distinct group. There is a common bond forged through pain and perseverance. This may be true to a lesser extent for long-suffering Mets fans but is fundamentally real for Ukrainians, Israelis, and Gazans suffering from harrowing wars.

Tribalism is born not only from suffering together, but also from collective joy. Common rituals from weddings to funerals can cement the loyalties of tribal members. So too can memories of a common past and projections of an imagined future destiny.  In both collective pain and common joy, individuals forge bonds of tribal identity that can inspire mutual aid and meaningful sacrifice for fellow tribal members who one barely knows; sometimes even for those one does not like.

One definition of tribalism is the feeling of solidarity with a group of people that would lead you to die for members of your tribe. People come together in a tribe, learn to depend upon and trust one another, and they build memories of a past and imaginations of a common future, precisely because solitary life as an individual carries dangers and fears of loneliness that can only be overcome through group solidarity. But the fact that we may prefer a lonely life of peace and plenty to a life of war and poverty doesn't change the fact that having something to sacrifice and die for often makes life more valuable and more satisfying. Tribal solidarity, quite simply, is something we all crave if we are to live rich and purposeful lives.

So I am a cosmopolitan. And, I am a tribalist. For most of my life this tension between my universalist commitments to human dignity and my particularist prejudices for my family, my neighbors, and my various tribes has played itself out as background dissonance. It was something I noticed, at moments, for example when I read Ralph Waldo Emerson's provocation to the lovers of humanity who want to help slaves in Barbados: "rather love your infant here at home." or to those who want to feed the starving in Africa:  "Are they my poor!!"

Emerson admonishes the philanthropist thusly: “I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong." He would rather give real solace and help to his poor who belong to his tribe, the poor who are here at home than pursue cosmopolitan philanthropy around the globe. Men do good deeds and give to charities around the world, Emerson saw, as penance for their living badly in their world at home. In a world where refugees across the oceans seem to receive more attention than the homeless on our streets, I've always found such challenges to my cosmopolitan sensibilities bracing.

Over the last year, I have been forced to struggle more directly with the contradictions and inconsistencies in my ambivalent position. Like all good cosmopolitans, I have been angered intensely by the profound suffering of the Chinese Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province, the people of Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine, and many others. And, of course the people in Gaza.  As much as I think that a share of the blame for the suffering in Gaza lies on Hamas and its leadership who abuse their own people for political gain, the cosmopolitan in me thinks that Israel has defended itself—something it has the right to do—with a tribal ferocity that dehumanizes Palestinian lives.

And yet I am a Jew. As a Jew, I understand that a world without a single Jewish state is very likely a catastrophe for all Jewish people. In living memory, we Jews suffered a genocide that sought to wipe us from the face of the earth. Most of the Jews who came to Israel came not as settlers but as displaced persons and refugees since no other country in the world would take them. Antisemitism is real, it is deadly, and it is very much alive. Since I begin with the belief that a Jewish homeland is a prerequisite for Jewish survival, and since it is clear that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran will not rest until Israel is destroyed, it is hard for me to deny Israel the right to defend itself.  

I recognize the contradictions inherent in my admittedly tribal position. I see them as deeply human contradictions— a red line running through the fact that cosmopolitanism may be a future ideal, but we humans are tribal creatures. I am a tribal human in spite of my cosmopolitan dreams.

Rightly or wrongly, I take some solace amidst my contradictions in the fact that Hannah Arendt also was inconsistent and contradictory in her attempts to balance cosmopolitan dreams and tribal realities when it came to the question of Israel.

Arendt had, to say the least, a complicated relation to Zionism. In 1933 she was arrested while working for the German Zionists to help collect evidence of Nazi antisemitism. She saw Zionism as the only truly political Jewish movement, a necessary response to the rise of tribal nationalism in European nations states and the failure of Jewish assimilation into European tribal nation states.

By the mid 1940s, however, Arendt had broken with mainstream Zionism. She strongly opposed Theodor Herzl and Vladomir Jabotinsky's aim of creating a Jewish nation-state in Mandate Palestine. She saw that the idea of a Jewish state was grounded in a "Central European ideology of nationalism and tribal thinking." (Jewish Writings, 437) She believed that any nationalism "held together by a common enemy" was suspect. (JW, 359) And Arendt worried that an exclusively Jewish state amidst an overwhelming Arab population led them to overlook the native population of the land. Arendt saw fault on both the Arab and Jewish sides. She criticized "Palestinian Arab leaders for insisting on a unitary Arab state as betraying an illusion that the Jewish settlers could be made to leave."[i]  But as a Jew, Arendt warned her fellow Jews "that Arabs were human beings like themselves and that it might be dangerous not to expect them to act and react in much the same way as Jews." (JW, 433)

Arendt hoped to find the beginnings of a new imagination of a post-nation-state world order.  She proposed a federation of homelands in Palestine that might one day spread across the Middle East and into Europe. By speaking of a Jewish homeland instead of a Jewish state, Arendt aimed to allow both Palestinian Arabs and Jews to do justice to their dream of national homelands while leaving the administration to a federated state. "Sovereignty would be dispersed across national communities while governance for the territory at large [would require] mutual action."[ii]

In such a Jewish homeland amidst a larger middle-eastern federation, Arendt hoped that Jews in Palestine could build a "Jewish cultural center [that] would inspire the spiritual development of all Jews in other countries, but would not need ethnic homogeneity and national sovereignty." (JW, 442)  She was especially happy with the founding of Hebrew University to enrich the study of Jewish thought in collaboration with Palestinians and other peoples. In addition, Arendt embraced a labor Zionism that sought to build a Jewish society on the basis of the kibbutzim to actualize "an age-old Jewish dream of a society based on justice, formed in complete equality [and] indifferent to all profit motives."[iii] (JW 443)  She saw the Zionists who formed kibbutzim and sought to govern themselves independently in small communities as a potential vanguard for a new world order that would abandon the nation-state system.

When Israel was created by the United Nations partition of the Mandate in 1948 and the ensuing war displaced hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were then not allowed to return to their homes, Arendt retreated from Jewish politics, defeated. And yet, that does not mean that Arendt denied either the right of Israel to exist or its importance for Jews. Covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Arendt took great pride in the accomplishments of the Jewish state even as she was intensely critical of the Israeli government. She thought the 1967 war was defensive and reasonable and wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy, "Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else." (Dec. 21, 1968) When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973 on Yom Kippur, Arendt spoke uncritically of Judaism as a national religion and later made a contribution to the United Jewish Appeal. (YB 456)

Critical of the fact that Israel was a nation state and scathing in her attacks on specific Israeli leaders, Arendt nevertheless maintained her absolute support for Israel. She declined an invitation to lecture at the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism by emphasizing her differences with that group and adding: "I know... that should catastrophe overtake the Jewish state, for whatever reason (even reasons of their own foolishness) this would be the final catastrophe for the whole Jewish people." (Young-Bruehl, 361)

As strongly as Arendt rejects tribal nationalism, she also rejects a liberal cosmopolitan project in which we reject tribal realities and political divisions for a universal idea of world citizenship. After 17 years as a stateless person Arendt received United States citizenship in 1950. In a letter to her first husband Günther Anders, Arendt calls her American passport "the most beautiful book." She was as fierce a critic of America as she was of Israel, but she also thought that the United States was the one country in the world that was free from tribal nationalism, an immigrant country in which all people could remain Jewish-American, Black-American, and Mexican American.  She refused to love any people, not the Germans, the Americans, or the Jews. She wrote to Gershom Scholem that while she does not love the Jews and does not believe in the Jews, she does affirm that she belongs to the Jews. It is that belonging to a particularist and tribal group that leads her to affirm in an interview with Günter Gaus: "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend onself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever."

The first line of Hannah Arendt's essay for her former teacher and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers reads: "Nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his own country." (Men in Dark Times, 81)

A citizen, Arendt writes in her essay "Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World," "is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries." We all are members of various nations, so many various political tribes. While philosophers might imagine a world government that is a homeland for all of mankind, "Politics," Arendt writes, "deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts." To dissolve the many countries, peoples, and states in the world into one world state would augur not a world of equality but a centralized world government "holding the monopoly of all means of violence, unchecked and uncontrolled by other sovereign powers." Such a cosmopolitan world government, Arendt argues, "would be the end of all political life as we know it." It would be a forbidding nightmare of tyranny

At the bleeding heart of tribalism is the conviction that I owe an allegiance to my tribe beyond the care and concern I might have for others. It is precisely this discriminatory distinction between the tribe and outsiders that is and should be unsettling to many cosmopolitans. It is easy for me to summon up anger and even hatred for those tribalists who would celebrate the pain and suffering of outsiders.

But here is the problem. Insofar as cosmopolitans see ourselves as superior to those who follow tribal instincts, we too act as a tribe.  Modern day cosmopolitans like to think they are free from tribalism, but we are actually a modern-day tribe of racially and religiously and ethnically diverse yet intellectually and economically homogenous global citizens. We may not be willing to die for each other, but that does not mean we are not a tribe; it just means we are a weak tribe, one without a strong sense of solidarity and common purpose. The superficiality of cosmopolitanism is likely one reason for the epidemic of loneliness, depression, and anxiety in cosmopolitan enclaves.

The great divide in modern society is neither racial nor economic; it is, as Ross Douthout writes, between those who, on the one side, “love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project," —that is, those liberals who "hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools,”— and those others who see the cosmopolitan elite as a “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

We liberal minded, college educated, cosmopolitans have faith in reason and technology but are skeptical of folk wisdom. We are at home in the virtual world of the internet or mindfulness retreats, but lost in the local pub or Nascar race. We believe we should listen to qualified experts rather than learn from the experiences of everyday people. We are more at home in libraries and laboratories than on the streets and in factories. Above all, we cosmopolitans look down on those we call tribal, those who value loyalty to their family, their friends, their political party, their region, their ethnicity, their religion, or their race over an uncompromising universalism, and those who prefer local wisdom to tested facts. We can be dismissive of the so-called deplorables who embrace nationalist or ethnic prejudices as well as those whose opinions we see as backwards and retrograde. 

The danger inherent in cosmopolitanism is this belief that as the tribeless tribe we claim to be open to all when, in fact, we act as if we are the highest and most exclusive of tribes. We do not see that without the ability to exclude others who are not members of your community, there is no community. 

Arendt rejects cosmopolitan world citizenship as a dangerous intellectualist and rationalist fantasy.  The danger of such a gigantic universal state and world citizenship is that "this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence." (MiDT, 87) In a single world state with equal citizens there is a radical loss of depth that comes from plurality and difference. The result is "shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear." (MiDT, 87) Arendt's suspicion of both cosmopolitanism and world government comes from her insight that "The establishment of one sovereign world state, far from being the prerequisite for world citizenship, would be the end of all citizenship." (MiDT, 82)

I'd like to end with three speculative thoughts on the subtitle for the conference: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics?

First, plurality is the foundation for Arendt's mantra that there is no Truth in politics. And yet, we need truth! In her essay Truth and Politics, Arendt writes that the Latin phrase fiat justitia, et pereat mundus (Let Justice be done even if the world should perish) is simply wrong. The world, she believes, is worth saving even if it is a world that contains injustice. The human world is meaningful even amidst injustice. But when Arendt considers a revision of the phrase that would read, fiat veritas, et pereat mundus (Let Truth be done, even if the world perish), she says that this formulation is actually more defensible. If there is not some truth in the world, there is no human world. The human world is a common world, a world we political creatures share with others. Such a shared world depends on truth. But the importance of truth, she argues, does not mean that truth must be secured by politics. On the contrary, truth is non-political, outside of politics. Truth is, as she metaphorically phrases it, the ground we walk on and the sky above us. We cannot live without a home, a rootedness in the world. We all need a tribe.
                 
Second, in a world of plurality there will be a multitude of overlapping tribes. We need to learn to live amidst strong tribal commitments. This means that we need to hold on to our own traditions and national pasts and also our own collective visions of a common future and we need to do so even as we also make space for other peoples, other nations, and other tribes to live amidst their own truths, their own traditions. We need, as a Arendt says in the essay on Jaspers as a world citizen, to break not with tradition but with the authority of tradition.

Third, a pluralist politics must emerge alongside a new common world without truth, not through the recognition of rationalist ideas, but by the act of talking with those who are members of tribes different from our own. The goal is not one cosmopolitan norm of world citizenship but a federated world of overlapping tribal commitments. One of my favorite of Arendt's insights is: "We become more just and more pious by thinking and talking about justice and piety."

In speaking with others, even those we fundamentally disagree with, we build a foundation for a shared conversation, a world in common. Arendt was unusually optimistic on this front when she wrote: "I personally do not doubt that from the turmoil of being confronted with reality without the help of precedent, that is, of tradition and authority, there will finally arise some new code of conduct." The potential rebirth of a new common ethical world is not only possible, but likely. It depends on the courage to speak honestly and openly absent ideological rigidity.

Arendt's biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl wrote of how Arendt spoke of her friends as her tribe. Young-Bruehl describes Hannah Arendt's tribe as a little island of cosmopolitanism and pariah consciousness. The word for tribe in German is Stamm, literally the truth of a tree. It is our tribe that places us in the world and gives us a refuge and a home. But our tribe also grows. It can support us as we branch out on adventures and take risks, but it is the world we come home to. As a circle of friends—both personal and political—our tribe is much more than an "-ism". It need not reject plurality. On the contrary, only with a strong tribe are we able to take the risks to build a world of true plurality and true cosmopolitanism, a world that aims not at world citizenship, but at the venturing forth int the uncertainty of the public world of tribes.

[i] Jonathan Graubart, Jewish Self Determination Beyond Zionism, 63, citing Arendt's Jewish Writings, pgs. 424-25.
[ii] Id. 65.
[iii] Id. 58ff.