As you will have noticed – assuming you have read any previous posts – the notion of us vs them has been a recurrent topic in recent posts – and actually it goes back a long way in the posts in terms of the way in which I see the world and how we each “belong” to different groupings – often arbitrarily and fleetingly – sometimes quite deliberately and long term – and occasionally permanently due to “force of circumstances.
Tribalism seems inbuilt to our psyche – we all love to belong to groups and we can all list lots and lots of “categories” that we fall into. Where it seems that a lot of people get things wrong from there is to assume that everything can be neatly categorised – all black or white – when in the real world things are definitely fuzzy!
Even some groupings that were once seemingly black or white now are seen to have much less hard boundaries and, of course, as soon as the boundaries are blurred then the categorisation becomes harder – and potentially less useful. That means it becomes harder to distinguish “us” from “them” because some of “them” share a lot of characteristics with “us”.
Some try to sort of do this the other way round and ‘assign’ people to categories – so there are a row of boxes and you get put into one – or another – depending on whatever factors they choose to split you up by. This, to me, seems very arbitrary. In my work I often came across things which attempted to do this sort of thing – you would get “four dimensions of X” or “six types of thingummybob” or “the nine characteristics of iffiness”. Usually these were well thought out and pretty useful.
They could be used to understand certain things and – most importantly perhaps – gave those people who were using the frameworks some common ground to stand on. I used to do it sometimes – I remember one of my papers listing five dimensions along which emergent properties could be characterised.
However, one thing I stressed was that five was actually a pretty arbitrary choice – others may see it as three or six or twenty two. In the “real world” there was seldom a problem that fitted neatly into any specific number of boxes. The twelve signs of the zodiac – sure you can find some commonality between people born “under the same sign”. The sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types fall in the same sort of category. There are many more….
These sort of things have their uses – some more than others – but – ultimately they are an insufficient category system for the human race as a whole. The problem becomes particularly troubling when someone takes any given category and then uses a 1-to-1 mapping between people and categories as the sole way of “judging” people.
Here we come back to usandthemism – anybody in a category with you is “us” and anyone in a different category is “them” – and you can then start to judge people based on that. I have done the Myers-Briggs categorisation myself and I get a pretty stable result. I have also done other, similar, tests and – again – the result is reasonably consistent (for instance – no matter what else changes I am never going to score well on “completer-finisher”). However, it would be very wrong for anyone to make decisions about me or to judge me on any way based solely on one of those categorisations – because, surprisingly, there is a bit more to me than that.
So – for me – it is essential to consider the “whole” person – all of the various influences and things that have contributed to who they are. I am Scottish – no doubt about that – but do I share much with ALL Scottish people – not really. I am male – but I certainly do not share all characteristics of every other male. In fact – I don’t think I would like to be judged on the basis of “typical characteristics” of any of the “tribes” that I might claim to belong to.
Someone described the phrase “angry young white male” as (potentially) ageist, racist and sexist. Describing someone using that phrase pulls up in your mind a “picture” which is (almost certainly) wrong about the person being so described. To completely describe that person you would have to continue with “bald, Welsh, tattooed, and so on and on…” the list would be a long one and some of the “tribes” mentioned may rather grate because – in your mind – they conjure up a picture that is diametrically opposed to another – like “generous Scot”. 😀
Where I am going with this is that taken to the extreme – and it is difficult not to do so if you are being specific – there is no “us” – there is only an “I” – and I belong to a number of tribes – each of which is an “us” but everyone else in that tribe is also a “them”. And “they” might well be in other tribes which have views that are different.
This has not been terribly well explained…. I am trying to write this as I think…. never a good idea – rather than working it all out beforehand. There is nothing inherently wrong in being in a “tribe” – where it becomes potentially toxic is when, say, you belong to Tribe A and Tribe B – Tribe B and Tribe C are bitter rivals – someone else belongs to Tribe A along with you – but also is a member of Tribe C. So – is that person “us” or “them”? An unanswerable question if the rules are followed because they are both us AND them.
(and before you think this is far-fetched I can think of precisely that relationship within my life many many times)
Is membership of one tribe ‘stronger’ than membership of another? Perhaps sometimes, but generally you feel strong ties to every tribe you are in. Inevitably this leads to some sort of conflict – perhaps as described above – perhaps because although two tribes are in general able to coexist in your life there will be times when you have to choose between them – what is more important – career or family? That is that sort of choice.
I will come back to this – but it is part of my working out how to avoid the usandthemism that can often cause much harm in society. Perhaps we should simply concentrate on the similarities rather than the differences – but that ultimately takes us to the other extreme – concentrating on the differences leaves only “I” – concentrating on what is the same leads to “allofus”.