Can we listen to Niebuhr's urging us out of our tribal limits?

The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men. (Reinhold Niebuhr)

If only we were able and willing to consider the “tribe” to be the totality of humanity, rather than the club, whether that club is the athletic team, the service club, the faith community, the linguistic/ethnic lineage, or the nation…especially the nation.

 We celebrate the tribal circles of influence in which we have “power” perhaps because we need to both demonstrate and to prove our worth that we are engaged. We, and others in the circle can and do ‘see’ the impact of our presence, thereby providing immediate feed-back, of our existence. To consider the whole of humanity as our ‘tribe’, however, is to carry the real risk of not being seen, heard, known and appreciated. Steeped in the requirements of being measured, including the need to “measure” ourselves in terms of the benchmarks of cultural norms, we rely on symbols of “success” from the very beginning. Starting with the family, the neighbourhood, school, church, theatre, restaurants, and local teams, we “belong” as part of our “socializing” almost as if the pack mentality provided not only protection but also identity.

Of course, these facilities, and social structures provide ‘nesting’ for children and their parents for basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and mentoring. Finding our way in the world, has to begin with challenges and opportunities that ‘fit’ our awareness, our age and maturity, and our capacity to deal with them without being overwhelmed. Roles, responsibilities and opportunities to learn about self and others, and the complexities of the multiple interactions, comprise our “schooling” for life. The narrative themes, events, conflicts, acceptances and both successes and failures form a maze of software programs laid over the hard wiring of our genetic identity and lineage. And attending to hourly, daily, weekly chores and timetables, activities and expectations of the adults in the room, we engage in those moments, many of which have been pre-planned by those closest to us at birth.

We initiate, through both birthdays and religious rituals, and we instruct in both formals and informal situations, in the hope and determination to prepare young children and adolescents for their adult lives. And, in the course of all of those ‘preparations’ we might, depending on our own childhood, and whether or not we  seek to endorse and to replicate some of its events and attributes, offer opportunities for children to engage with a wider world. Rotary exchange students, are not only an example of enriched opportunities for young people from around the world to visit and to experience the customs and the condiments, the spices and the scenery of new places. They also enrich the fabric and the culture of the host clubs, communities and families who integrate those young people. Such opportunities are far too rare, although both travel and costs of such projects have made the model more accessible. National programs like the former Peace Corps of the United States also birthed a generation of young adults whose consciousness was profoundly shaped by their experiences ‘abroad’. Today, universities have been developing and enriching programs of international study, as a way to expand the horizons of their graduates as well as to enhance the network of persons with both a knowledge of how other people of different places, languages and customs live, but also a deeper appreciation of both their own range of opportunities and a connection to a concept, now with names and faces, with tactile and visceral memories, that stretches their perceptions, their circle both literally and metaphorically.

Of course, all of these opportunities are available only to a very small slice of any population, mainly to those whose own wealth and education and community associations make the opportunities known and accessible to aspiring young people. Increasingly, philanthropic cells have been developing in various locations where needs have been identified that cry out to those able to offer help. And the opportunities to support those non-profits have increased exponentially over the last few decades. Once again, however, both the activists and their respective target populations, while growing long-term and often deep relationships, have to experience the kind of social and fiscal and psychological dependence the risks of which have to be mediated. Just as the original ‘missionaries’ who brought their messages of both faith and “civilizing-the-savages” (often as a single unified over-powering indoctrination based on a conviction that those missionaries are/were doing God’s will and work!) faced unconscious and highly traumatic bias and prejudices, so to there is an inevitable element of the parent-child nexus in many of these projects, even with their intended benefits.

The culture of family, school, community and all of the warm fuzzies about those features of everyone’s life is supported by some very powerful forces: advertising, consuming, competing, the church, and all of the ‘team’ and platoon/battalion/regiment connections that serve the military and the quasi-military institutions, corporations and political parties. We literally sanctify many of those “warm fuzzies” to a degree that inevitably seeds and nurtures attitudes of disrespect and perhaps even contempt. “If all of those families are living the good life,’ the self-talk goes, ‘then why is this family not doing something akin to that’? Feelings of unworthiness, perhaps spawned in the childhood of parents who may have endured toxic environments, or excessive ambitions of parents who are determined to have their children “succeed” or perhaps a strong ambition for success within parents themselves, resulting in extended absences, both physically and emotionally….these are some of the seeds of family dysfunction. Care-givers, inevitably emerge as expressions of kindness, sympathy and sometimes empathy for those in duress. And, similarly to the elevation of the warm fuzzies of family life, our culture also holds up the care-givers as models of the Good Samaritan, that entrenched biblical verse that champions the rescuer.

So, in many instances, the ‘rescuer’ from all sorts of pain has become a model of both integrity and honour, even spiritual humility. And we have extended the applications of that model to how we “perceive” and “conceptualize” many of our social problems. Leading the way on the rescuer is the church, the incubator of some healthy and collaborative approaches, as well as seeding other attitudes and approaches that are self-sabotaging, both for the church and its adherents. The cliché that captures the essence of this ‘holy’ attitude goes something like, “Everything is going to be alright and you are going to get better and beat this disease!” These words, uttered in the best of intentions, are not only self-serving of the speaker; they are also condescending and patronizing to the patient, given their unreliability and their denial of the evidence.

Of course, miracles do happen, and yet, to couch pastoral visits in false hope is a denial of truth and reality beyond tolerance. Prayers, active listening and sheer attentive and even silent presence are far more appropriate in those situations. And yet, the rescuer archetype, while necessary in dire emergencies, fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes, and even in the emergency rooms of our hospitals and clinics, is not a model for health relationships, at any level. Nevertheless, having not either taught or learned the superior value and worth of truth, including sometimes uncomfortable truths of having been hurt even if and when the hurt was not intended, we are swimming in waters that endorse, inculcate and elevate the concept of the rescuer as hero. We then place pedagogues in classrooms where the discernment between the need for compassion and empathy up against the need for discipline and control is essential.

For a majority raised in such a culture, there is a divide between the way men and women approach the moment of encountering pain in another, especially one who is close both in the family and in the circle. While men are taciturn and somewhat uncomfortable generally, and tend to adopt a “is there anything I can do to help”? approach, while remaining quite silent and perhaps a little confused, women, on the other hand, being hard-wired for motherhood, are extremely comfortable, cozy supportive generally, with expressions of support and empathy, without consciously thinking or strategizing about it. Spontaneous overt support from the females is both a sustaining antidote for the plethora of pains we see around us as well as an unspoken aspect of identity, often linked to “goodness” and altruism and a better society.

On the other hand, excessive empathy, if such a notion is even admissible in today’s culture, to some, seems to elevate all pain to a psychic condition requiring psychiatric ‘treatment’. Grief of a family member, following the death of one of that family, has recently been included as a clinical condition. For some, including this scribe, that is a reach too far. Not only have we all participated in the sacralizing of the “warm, loyal, supportive and happy family” while we witness its erosion and decay all around us, we have also elevated the psychologizing of human lives and their medical and medicinal treatments into a kind of professional and politically correct ritual. Many domestic partners, for example, are quite comfortable “sending” one partner into therapy, while the other remains immune to any need or desire for therapy, when, in fact, the issues among and between them are to some degree shared, and contributed to by both. Males, almost without exception are those “sent” into therapy, by their female partners, and whether or not they comply or resist becomes another issue in the partnership.

So, the sacralizing of the nuclear family, and its endorsement by the ecclesial community, including and emphasized by the ecclesial authority, is a pattern around which, or even in which, many children are raised. This model, naturally, spreads throughout the rest of the culture, in both positive and negative footprints. Those whose early experiences were less than sanguine will carry a certain kind of memory “card” while those with “happy childhoods” will bring a different kind of memory ‘card’ into their adult lives. Issues of authority, integrity, fear, unworthiness, self-acceptance/rejection, social affinity/alienation, courage and optimism/pessimism….these and others will all find a way to play out, triggered in part by the kind of social and political and cultural crock-pot in which one lives and works.

Habits, too, for example of how to deal with conflict, the range of what becomes essential for anyone to include in that repertoire, or what is excluded, denied, avoided…these are also matters that find their early seeds in youth.  A slogan graphic hanging on a kitchen wall that reads: “All of the hopes of all of the tomorrow’s are planted in the seeds of today” expresses this adequately. The insertion: “all of the weeds of tomorrow are also planted in the seeds of today” is rarely committed to a similar graphic.

Nevertheless, most of us perceive, perhaps even believe, that “our” way of doing things, in our family and home community/church/school/workplace, is, at first the only way we know, and then, for some, the ‘best’ way for reasons that remain somewhat puzzling. Old habits, burned into the unconscious, form a tapestry of weaving that hangs on our psychic and emotional wall, as well perhaps as our family room wall. Sometimes instead of a tapestry, those habits become a concrete boot encasing both feet, enabling a perception of both authority and righteousness. And, along with such habits, incarnated by faces and names that meant something to each of us, we bring those ‘tribal’ features into the rest of our lives.

The question of how others, in different times, places, ethnicities, religions, languages, laws, diets, and innate talents and inherent institutions pass through a similar apprenticeship, however, is for many, outside their comfort zone. Even if and when people not originally “from” here arrive, those ‘inside’ the tribe very often view them with suspicion, especially if the preservation of the rituals, habits, traditions and expectations of the tribe are sacrosanct. “How we do things here” is a kind of moat, a linguistic and cultural moat, that declares to any from “away” (to borrow from the Newfoundlanders) that, in order to fit in here, and to be accepted, there are specific proving-ground steps over which one has to demonstrate a mastery, before one will be welcomed, embraced and permitted to participate. Often, too those ‘steps’ are not articulated because to do so would mean that the ‘closed’ shop of ‘natives’ would have to be considered a “gate-keeping’ function openly, honestly and transparently.

And no institution “does” gate-keeping half as religiously as the churches. Not only are those people preserving their ‘community’ but they are also preserving (at least in their own mind) the will and wishes and aspirations of their God, as they perceive them to be. And that form of religiosity, underscored as a requisite of discipleship to a deity, comprises much of the tribe’s identity and expectations.

For a non-indigenous person, for example, to attend a sweat lodge among indigenous people, is a step many non-indigenous have not taken, and have not even considered. Mu guess is that such an experience would go a long way to melting some of the ice that encases race relations in Canada.

Similarly, if all service clubs, and all religious parishes and all schools were to include in their activities, the opportunities both to communicate with those in “foreign” lands, and then to exchange time spent with each other, to learn both the similarities and differences of two ways of living and being….and if all professional schools were to include in their curricula the opportunity to study in other lands, and to read the best thinkers from other times and places, (not only the Greek philosophers, or the French pedagogues, or the Swiss or Austrian doctors, or the African explorers, or the American capitalists)….so that, in addition to the skills and the formal training of each ‘school’ graduates would become open to, familiar with, and comfortable with the “other” as they are incarnated in real people, in real places, in real time, in the lifetime of those young adults.

Our co-existence, indeed our survival, may well depend on our shift from a local, regional, provincial or national 'tribe' perspective and attitude to a perspective, atttidude and acknolwdgement of  our shared international, global, and mutually inter-dependent tribe. Pandemics, carbon dioxide and methane, as well as fresh, clean drinking water are needed in equal proportion, and requirement, and are a mutually shared right for all of us. While there are some advantages to provincialism and parochialism, there are serious limitations to its exclusivity.

Of course, I am dreaming in technicolour! Guilty as charged!