“Tribes,” Neoliberalism, and Public Service

Tribes, Neoliberalism, and Public Service

A few weeks ago I heard a talk by Sebastian Junger, the journalist and documentary filmmaker who wrote The Perfect Storm. He was talking about his latest book, Tribes, which draws on his time embedded with a US platoon at an isolated outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger is trying to understand why our troops coming home from today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have such high rates of PTSD and often find it so hard to re-integrate into society. Studies suggest PTSD rates are higher now than for Vietnam vets, which were higher than after World War II—an odd trend since the average level of violence was greater in Vietnam than in Iraq, and far greater in WWII than either.

Junger thinks the key problem is not that war has become worse, but that modern society has become worse: “Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two…In combat, soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion, and politics within their platoon. It’s no wonder many of them get so depressed when they come home.”

Junger makes much of the experiences of Indian tribes and, by extension, other hunter-gatherers where people lived intimately in small groups and there was no gap between warriors and the larger community. If you fought, you knew who you were fighting for, and you returned to a group where everyone worked, played, fought, and loved together and for one another. As Junger points out, throughout American history thousands of Europeans ran off to join the Indians, but virtually no Indians ever voluntarily crossed over to join ‘us.’

Junger thinks we are products of a long evolutionary experience in which we evolved for this kind of life, and our deepest satisfactions come from intense experiences of group solidarity, often under threat. He says we get glimpses of this after 9/11 or a hurricane or an earthquake, when people forget their differences and band together against an enemy or to deal with the breakdown of normal life. When this happens suicide rates and instances of depression—terribly common in modern America, and virtually unknown in tribal societies—go down, despite the fact that life has objectively gotten worse.

It is easy to deride this sort of romanticism. Tribal life may be nobly egalitarian and communal, but it can also be stifling, cramped, and full of arbitrary decisions and restrictions. Anthropological studies of existing hunter-gatherers suggest levels of intra-tribe and inter-tribe violence are intense, with up to 1/3 of males dying in murders, feuds, raids, skirmishes, and wars. Indians, as Junger acknowledges, often inflicted stomach-churning tortures on captives. Not to mention famines, diseases, wild animals, floods, and countless other dangers. Human beings shifted to settled agricultural communities with strong hierarchical social systems for some very good reasons.

But I think Junger nevertheless has it partly right. There is a debate in Western thought between those who explain human brokenness—our own internal sense that we are divided from our fellow man or God or our own best self—as inherent in our flawed natures, and those who argue it is because we have somehow strayed from the right life for human beings. The Bible, and the Plato of the Symposium, with Aristophanes’ portrait of human beings cut in half and always seeking their missing self, are in the first camp. Man is born/created as a divided being. In this view, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a tribe or a city or a great empire—you take your brokenness with you.

But there is a second tradition that gives more weight to the type of society you find yourself in. In this camp are Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and other moderns where the division is historical, not natural. For Hobbes the escape from the state of nature is a necessary tragedy; freedom is too dangerous to endure. For Rousseau it is an unnecessary tragedy that we need to repair. In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau imagines man in the state of nature as peaceful and content, but not really human at all—solitary and speechless. One cannot genuinely want to return to such a condition, however awful modern society might be. But Rousseau thinks a happy medium exists, and is not a utopia—it is a reality for many people, or at least it was when he wrote in the 18th century. Rousseau says that the stage of human development between the “indolence of the primitive state” [the pure state of nature] and the “petulant activity of our vanity” [modern life] was “the least subject to revolution, the best for man, and that he must have come out of it only by some fatal accident…The example of savages, who have almost all been found at this point, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable prime of the world…”. He points out in a footnote what Junger borrows, that no savage has ever voluntarily become civilized, while thousands of Europeans have gone the other way; even Christian missionaries have praised the calm and innocent days spent with savage peoples. Rousseau acknowledges that life in this state is imperfect, “bloodthirsty and cruel.” But it is simple, direct, and infused with natural sympathy and affections.

The industrial and scientific revolution generated a burst of enthusiasm that now at last we had found a way to square this circle. The abundance of the new productive economy would let everyone be equal and do away with the need for tyrannical government. Fighting over scarce resources, at the root of so much conflict within and between societies, would wane, and the martial virtues would be less esteemed. All men would become brothers.

These hopes have been partially realized. Violence has in fact dramatically dropped in advanced industrialized countries, contrary to popular opinion, and this despite extremely destructive interstate wars. Much of the world lives in unprecedented conditions of security against the vagaries of nature. Modern democratic governments are less arbitrary and tyrannical than any large-scale governments known in the past.

But no one would say modern society has recreated the closeness of the tribe or even of the agricultural village—quite the opposite. The drive to maximize productivity has rested on maximizing the individual and fostering competition, envy, acquisitiveness, and self-assertion. There have been many small-scale efforts to escape from this society and live by other rules in communes and collectives, most of which fail. The most successful seem to have a strong religious center that enforces a strict separation from the outside world, like the Amish and Hutterites in North America. The Soviet Union and other large-scale efforts to create socialist societies that foster group solidarity over individualism have been markedly less productive and have led to new forms of tyranny.

We aren’t about to give up the benefits of modern life to recreate tribal experiences or close-knit communities. But within these bounds we can do better. Think of the difference between WWII veterans and today’s. WWII was everyone’s war with mass conscription, where the hero was the average guy, GI Joe. People from all walks of life and all parts of the country served together and made connections that often endured long past the war itself. When soldiers came back they got little compared to the medical and psychological support available today, but they did get recognition from a society where most people had served and sacrificed. They got the GI bill that not only helped a whole generation move into the middle class but was a signal of how the country valued what they had done.

Soldiers now are volunteers, so whatever they suffer, the unspoken thought from fellow citizens is “well, you chose it.” By previous standards today’s soldiers are well-paid and provided for, and get a lot of post-service benefits, many of which are easy to abuse—as Junger painfully acknowledges. Just as many Americans see those in the military as individuals who have chosen a job with certain risks, no different than a miner or oilfield worker, so soldiers can easily see it as a transactional relationship where they are entitled to get every penny they can squeeze out of the system. A pat on the back and “thank you for your service” from a public that neither knows nor cares what they did only deepens the divide.

Junger strongly recommends some form of mandatory public service for all citizens. In an increasingly polarized country where we have segregated ourselves more and more by income, class, politics and race, he wants to ensure that everyone has at least once in their life a communal experience with a cross-section of fellow Americans. This remedy for selfishness has been regularly suggested ever since we ended the draft, but runs counter to the neoliberal individualism that has dominated public debate in the US for the last 30 years. Junger is scathing in his description of how our embrace of the most extreme versions of individualism has contributed to creating a society soldiers can’t identify with. His exhibit A is the 2007 financial meltdown where the perpetrators escaped without punishment, despite the terrible damage done to their community.

We won’t be able to consider fixes such as mandatory service until we shake off the idea that markets are the measure of all things. We can start by recognizing the abundant warning signs of social and political disarray, including the returning soldiers our country has sent, and continues to send, to war with so little care and with so little understanding of why they feel alone and adrift.