In this 1977 lecture, Ayn Rand examines the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics. Drawing her title from the Balkan Peninsula, where tribal groups have warred for centuries, Rand argues that the global trend toward political organization based on race, language and religion bodes ill for the future of Western civilization. Pointing to examples from Canada to Europe as well as observations by the news media, Rand contrasts the disintegration inherent in modern tribalism with the unity displayed by societies that respect individual rights regardless of race or ancestry.
A version of this talk appeared in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989). With permission of the publisher, the full essay is available online for the first time below.
Have you ever wondered about the process of the collapse of a civilization? Not the cause of the collapse — the ultimate cause is always philosophical — but the process, the specific means by which the accumulated knowledge and achievements of centuries vanish from the earth?
The possibility of the collapse of Western civilization is not easy to imagine or to believe. Most people do not quite believe it — in spite of all the horror movies about the end of the world in a nuclear blast. But of course the world has never been destroyed by a sudden catastrophe. Man-made catastrophes of that size are not sudden; they are the result of a long, slow, gradual process, which can be observed in advance.
Let me remind you — as I have said many times before — that there is no such thing as historical determinism. The world does not have to continue moving toward disaster. But unless men change their philosophical direction — which they still have time to do — the collapse will come. And if you want to know the specific process that will bring it about, that process — the beginning of the end — is visible today.
In The New York Times of January 18, 1976, under the title “Europe’s Restive Tribes,” columnist C. L. Sulzberger is crying out in anxious bewilderment against a phenomenon he cannot understand: “It is distressing to return from Africa and find the cultivated old continent of Europe subsiding into its own form of tribalism just as new African governments make concerted efforts to curb the power of tribes and subordinate them to the greater concept of the nation-state.”
By “tribalism,” Mr. Sulzberger means the separatist movements spreading throughout Europe. “Indeed,” he declares,
it is a peculiar phenomenon of contemporary times that so many lands which had formerly been powerful and important seem obsessed with reducing the remnants of their own strength. . . . There is no logical reason that a Scotland which was proud to be considered part of the British Empire’s heart when the sun never set on it, from Calcutta to Capetown, is now increasingly eager to disengage from what is left of that grand tradition on an offshore European island. [Emphasis added.]
Oh yes, there is a very logical reason why Great Britain is falling apart, but Mr. Sulzberger does not see it — just as he does not see what was grand about that old tradition. He is the Times’ columnist specializing in European affairs, and, like a conscientious reporter, he is disturbed by something which he senses to be profoundly wrong — but, tending to be a liberal, he is unable to explain it.
He keeps coming back to the subject again and again. On July 3, 1976, in a column entitled “The Split Nationality Syndrome,” he writes: “The present era’s most paradoxical feature is the conflict between movements seeking to unify great geographical blocs into federations or confederations, and movements seeking to disintegrate into still smaller pieces the component nations trying to get together.”
He offers an impressive list of examples. In France there is a Corsican autonomy movement, and similar movements of French Basques, of French Bretons, and of French inhabitants of the Jura belt west of Switzerland. “Britain is now obsessed with what is awkwardly called ‘devolution.’ This means watered-down autonomy and is designed to satisfy Welsh, but above all Scottish, nationalists.” Belgium remains split “by an apparently insoluble language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish.” Spain is facing demands for local independence “in Catalonia and the northern Basque country. . . . German-speaking inhabitants of Italy’s Alto Adige yearn to leave Rome and submit to Vienna. There is a tiny British-Danish argument . . . over the status of the Faroe Islanders. . . . In Yugoslavia there are continuing disputes between Serbs and Croats. . . . There is also unresolved ferment among Macedonians . . . some of whom, on occasion, revive old dreams of their own state including Greek Salonika and part of Bulgaria.”
Please remember that these tribes and subtribes, which most of the world has never heard of — since they have achieved no distinction to hear about — are struggling to secede from whatever country they are in and to form their own separate, sovereign, independent nations on their two-by-four stretches of the earth’s crust.
I must make one correction. These tribes did achieve a certain kind of distinction: a history of endless, bloody warfare.
Coming back to Mr. Sulzberger: Africa, he points out, is torn apart by tribalism (in spite of the local governments’ efforts), and most of Africa’s recent wars were derived “from tribal causes.” He concludes by observing: “The schizophrenic impulses splitting Europe threaten actually to atomize Africa — and all in the name of progress and unity.”
In a column entitled “Western Schizophrenia” (December 22, 1976), Mr. Sulzberger cries: “The West is not drawing closer together; it is coming apart. This is less complicated but perhaps more distressing in North America than in Europe.” For myself, I will add: and more disgusting.
Mr. Sulzberger continues: “Canada is apparently getting ready to tear itself asunder for emotional if illogical reasons which, on a massive scale, resemble the language dispute that continually splits Belgium . . .” He predicts the possibility of a formal separation between French-speaking Quebec and the rest of Canada, and comments sadly and helplessly: “Whatever happens, it is hard to foresee much good for the West ensuing.” Which is certainly true.
Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism?
Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group — any group — which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group — they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices — so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.
This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”
For over half a century, modern liberals have been observing the fact that their ideas are achieving the opposite of their professed goals: instead of “liberation,” communism has brought the blood-drenched dictatorship of Soviet Russia — instead of “prosperity,” socialism has brought starvation to China, and Cuba, and India (and Russia) — instead of “brotherhood,” the welfare state has brought the crumbling stagnation and the fierce, “elitist” power struggle of Great Britain, and Sweden, and many other, less obvious victims — instead of “peace,” the spread of international altruism has brought about two world wars, an unceasing procession of local wars, and the suspending of a nuclear bomb over the heads of mankind. Yet this record does not prompt the liberals to check their premises or to glance, for contrast, at the record of the social system the last remnants of which they are so ferociously destroying.
Now we are seeing another demonstration of the fact that their professed goals are not the motive of today’s liberals. We are seeing a special kind of intellectual cover-up — a cover-up so dirty and so low that it makes Watergate look like a childish caper.
Observe that ever since World War II, racism has been regarded as a vicious falsehood and a great evil, which it certainly is. It is not the root of all social evils — the root is collectivism — but, as I have written before (in The Virtue of Selfishness), “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” One would think that Hitler had given a sufficient demonstration of racism’s evil. Yet today’s intellectuals, particularly the liberals, are supporting and propagating the most virulent form of racism on earth: tribalism.
The cover-up that makes it possible lies in a single word: ethnicity.
“Ethnicity” is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism” — and it has no clearly definable meaning. But you can get a lead to its meaning if you hunt through a dictionary. The following are the results of my hunt through The Random House College Dictionary (1960), a book intended for young people.
I found no such term as “ethnicity.” But I found “ethnic,” which is defined as follows: “pertaining or peculiar to a population, esp. to a speech group, loosely also to a race.” Under “ethnic group,” the definition given as sociological usage reads: “a group of people, racially or historically related, having a common and distinctive culture, as an Italian or Chinese colony in a large American city.”
I looked up the word “culture.” The definition given as sociological usage reads: “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which is transmitted from one generation to another.” I looked up also the word “tribe.” The definition reads: “1. any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs, and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc. 2. a local division of a primitive or barbarous people.”
The meaning of the sum of these definitions is fairly clear: the term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language — but physiology, i.e., race, is involved and mentioned in all but one of these definitions. So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition — i.e., racism plus conformity — i.e., racism plus staleness.
The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic — and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture. Tradition has nothing to do with it; tradition is being challenged and blasted daily in a free, civilized society: its citizens accept ideas and products because they are true and/or good — not because they are old or because their ancestors accepted them. In such a society, concretes change, but what remains immutable — by individual conviction, not by tradition — are those philosophical principles which correspond to reality, i.e., which are true.
The “old” and the “ancestral” are the standards of tradition, which supersedes reality, the standards of value of those who accept and practice “ethnicity.” Culture, in the modern sociologists’ view, is not a sum of achievements, but of “ways of living . . . transmitted from one generation to another.” This means: concrete, specific ways of living. Can you — who are still the children of the United States of America — imagine the utter horror of a way of living that does not change from generation to generation? Yet this is what the advocates of ethnicity are advocating.
Is such a way of living compatible with reason? It is not. Is it compatible with independence or individuality? It is not. Is it compatible with progress? Obviously not. Is it compatible with capitalism? Don’t be funny. What century are we talking about? We are dealing with a phenomenon that is rising out of prehistorical ages.
Atavistic remnants and echoes of those ages have always existed in the backwaters of civilized countries, particularly in Europe, among the old, the tired, the timid, and those who gave up before they started. Such people are the carriers of “ethnicity.” The “ways of living” they transmit from generation to generation consist in: folk songs, folk dances, special ways of cooking food, traditional costumes, and folk festivals. Although the professional “ethnics” would (and did) fight wars over the differences between their songs and those of their neighbors, there are no significant differences between them; all folk art is essentially similar and excruciatingly boring: if you’ve seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you’ve seen them all.
Now observe the nature of those traditional ethnic “achievements”: all of them belong to the perceptual level of man’s consciousness. All of them are ways of dealing with or manipulating the concrete, the immediately given, the directly perceivable. All of them are manifestations of the preconceptual stage of human development.
I quote from one of my articles: “The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes — by the same kind of ‘finite’ world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is ‘finite’ in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say ‘finite,’ they mean ‘perceptual.’” (This is from “The Missing Link” [in Philosophy: Who Needs It]. That article deals with the psycho-epistemological roots of modern tribalism.)
In the same article I said: “John Dewey’s theory of Progressive education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with ‘social adjustment.’ It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities.”
A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language.
Language is a conceptual tool — a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of printing on every postage stamp the word “postage” for the
English-speaking and the word “postes” for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada. Since most of the ethnic languages are not full languages, but merely dialects or local corruptions of a country’s language, the distinctions which the tribalists fight for are not even as big as that.
But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.
The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four — or rather three-and-a-half — languages: English, French, Russian, and the half is German, which I can read but not speak. I found this knowledge extremely helpful when I began writing: it gave me a wider range and choice of concepts; it showed me four different styles of expression; it made me grasp the nature of languages as such, apart from any set of concretes.
(Speaking of concretes, I would say that every civilized language has its own inimitable power and beauty, but the one I love is English — the language of my choice, not of my birth. English is the most eloquent, the most precise, the most economical, and, therefore, the most powerful. English fits me best — but I would be able to express my identity in any Western language.)
The tribalists clamor that their language preserves their “ethnic identity.” But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect serves a similar function: it provides a pretense at “collective self-esteem,” an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist’s stagnant consciousness.
The proclaimed desire to preserve one’s language and/or its literary works, if any, is a cover-up. In a free, or even semi-free country, no one is forbidden to speak any language he chooses with those who wish to speak it. But he cannot force it on others. A country has to have only one official language if men are to understand one another — and it makes no difference which language it is, since men live by the meaning, not the sound, of words. It is eminently fair that a country’s official language should be the language of the majority. As to literary works, their survival does not depend on political enforcement.
But to the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language to them is a symbol of tribal status and power — the power to force their dialect on all outsiders. This appeals not even to the tribal leaders, but to the sick, touchy vanity of the tribal rank and file.
In this connection, I want to mention a hypothesis of mine, which is only a hypothesis because I have given no special study to the subject of bilingual countries, i.e., countries that have two official languages. But I have observed the fact that bilingual countries tend to be culturally impoverished by comparison to the major countries whose language they share in part. Bilingual countries do not produce many great, first-rate achievements in any intellectual line of endeavor, whether in science, philosophy, literature, or art. Consider the record of Belgium (which is French-speaking in part) as against the record of France — or the record of Switzerland (a trilingual country) as against the record of France, of Germany, of Italy — or the record of Canada as against the record of the United States.
The cause of the poor records may lie in the comparative territorial smallness of those countries — but this does not apply to Canada versus the United States. The cause may lie in the fact that the best, most talented citizens of the bilingual countries tend to emigrate to the major countries — but this still leaves the question: Why do they?
My hypothesis is as follows: the policy of bilingual rule (which spares some citizens the necessity to learn another language) is a concession to, and a perpetuation of, a strong ethnic-tribalist element within a country. It is an element of anti-intellectuality, conformity, and stagnation. The best minds would run from such countries: they would sense, if not know it consciously, that tribalism leaves them no chance.
But quite apart from this particular hypothesis, there can be no doubt that the spread of tribalism is an enormously anti-intellectual evil. If, as I said, some elements of “ethnicity” did remain in the backyards of civilized countries and stayed harmless for centuries, why the sudden epidemic of their rebirth?
Irrationalism and collectivism — the philosophical notions of the prehistorical eras — had to be implemented in practice, in political action, before they could engulf the greatest
scientific-technological achievements mankind had ever reached. The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the mixed economy — the transitional stage of the formerly civilized countries of the West on their way to the political level from which the rest of the world has never emerged: the level of permanent tribal warfare.
As I wrote in my article on “Racism” (in The Virtue of Selfishness): “The growth of racism in a ‘mixed economy’ keeps step with the growth of government controls. A ‘mixed economy’ disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.”
When a country begins to use such expressions as “seeking a bigger share of the pie,” it is accepting a tenet of pure collectivism: the notion that the goods produced in a country do not belong to the producers, but belong to everybody, and that the government is the distributor. If so, what chance does an individual have of getting a slice of that pie? No chance at all, not even a few crumbs. An individual becomes “fair game” for every sort of organized predator. Thus people are pushed to surrender their independence in exchange for tribal protection.
The government of a mixed economy manufactures pressure groups — and, specifically, manufactures “ethnicity.” The profiteers are those group leaders who discover suddenly that they can exploit the helplessness, the fear, the frustration of their “ethnic” brothers, organize them into a group, present demands to the government — and deliver the vote. The result is political jobs, subsidies, influence, and prestige for the leaders of the ethnic groups.
This does not improve the lot of the group’s rank and file. It makes no difference to the hard-pressed unemployed of any race or color what quota of jobs, college admissions, and Washington appointments were handed out to the political manipulators from their particular race or color. But the ugly farce goes on, with the help and approval of the intellectuals, who write about “minority victories.”
Here is a sample of the goal of such victories. In The New York Times of January 17, 1977, a news story was headlined as follows: “Hispanic Groups Say They Are Inequitably Treated in Support for Arts.” At a hearing on the subject, New York State Senator Robert Garcia declared: “What we are really talking about is dollars and whether we are receiving a fair share of the revenues generated in this state.” The purpose of the demands for state dollars was “to assure the growth of ‘non-mainstream art forms.’” This means: art forms which people do not care to see or to support. The recommendations reached at the hearing included the demand that “at least twenty-five percent of the money goes to Hispanic arts.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what your tax money is being spent on: the new profiteers of altruism are not the poor, the sick, or the unemployed, but ethnic females swishing their skirts in old Spanish dances which were not too good even when they were new.
This is a typical example of the motives and the vested interests behind the growth, the pushing, and the touting of “ethnicity.” An interesting article was published in the British magazine Encounter (February 1975). It is entitled “The Universalisation of Ethnicity” and is written by Nathan Glazer, a well-known American sociologist. It is quite revealing of the modern intellectuals’ attitude toward the spread of ethnicity — more revealing in what Mr. Glazer does not say than in what he does.
He observes: “The overwhelming majority of people . . . are born into a religion, rather than adopt it, just as they are born into an ethnic group. In this respect both are similar. They are both groups by ‘ascription’ rather than ‘achievement.’ They are groups in which one’s status is immediately given by birth rather than gained by some activities in one’s life.”
This is eminently — and horribly — true. There is a great deal to be said about the horrifying approach of a world dominated by people who prefer “ascription” to “achievement,” and who seek a physiologically determined, automatically given status rather than a status they have to earn. Mr. Glazer does not say it; he merely reports.
He is disturbed by the relationship of “ethnic group” to “caste,” but treats it merely as a problem of definitions. But, of course, castes are inherent in the notion of ethnicity — castes of superiors and inferiors, determined by birth, enforced and perpetuated by law, dividing people into “aristocrats,” “commoners,” etc., down to “untouchables.”
Mr. Glazer makes a true and profoundly important statement: “The United States is perhaps unique among the states of the world in using the term ‘nation’ to refer not to an ethnic group but to all who choose to become Americans.” But he draws no conclusions from it. Yet it is extremely significant that the United States was the archenemy and the destroyer of ethnicity, that it abolished castes and any sort of inherited titles, that it granted no recognition to groups as such, that it recognized only the right of the individual to choose the associations he wished to join. Freedom of association is the opposite of ethnicity.
Mr. Glazer does not raise the question of the original American philosophy and the relationship of its destruction to the rise of ethnicity. The focus of his interest lies elsewhere. He writes: “The Socialist hope for a trans-national class struggle, based on class identification, never came to pass. Instead, it has been replaced by national and ethnic conflicts.” And: “In most countries national interests and ethnic interests seem to dominate over class interests.” Mr. Glazer is baffled by this development. He offers some tentative explanations with which he himself is not satisfied, such as: “The trends of modernisation, even while they do destroy some bases of distinctive culture and distinctive identity, create a need for a new kind of identity related to the old, intimate type of village or tribal association.” A modern, technological society, which includes nuclear bombs and space travel — to be run by villages or by tribal associations?
Mr. Glazer himself tends to dismiss theories of this sort, and admits that he cannot find an explanation. “This is the heart of the darkness. Why didn’t the major lines of conflict within societies become class conflicts rather than ethnic conflicts? . . . In most developing countries Marxism remains the ideology of the students and often of the ruling group — but ethnicity is the focus around which identity and loyalty have been shaped.” Mr. Glazer comes closer to an answer when he observes that ethnicity has “an irrational appeal,” but he takes it no further. He says instead:
It would seem that the rallying cries that mobilise the classes have, in recent decades, had less power than the rallying cries that mobilise the races, tribes, religions, language-users — in short, the Ethnic Groups. Perhaps the epidemic of ethnic conflicts reflects the fact that leaders and organisers believe they can get a more potent response by appealing to ethnicity than they can by appealing to Class Interest.
True, leaders and organizers do believe this — but why? The answer to Mr. Glazer’s questions lies in the fact that Marxism is an intellectual construct; it is false, but it is an abstract theory — and it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities. It requires a significantly high level of abstraction to grasp the reality of “an international working class” — a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the nearest town as fully real. No, the level of men’s intelligence has not deteriorated from natural causes; it has been pushed down, retarded, stultified by modern anti-intellectual education and modern irrationalist philosophy.
Mr. Glazer does not see or is not concerned with any part of this answer. It is obvious that he is disturbed by the spread of ethnicity, but he tries to hope for the best — and this leads him, in conclusion, to a truly unspeakable statement. After proposing some sort of solution in the form of “either guaranteed shares for each group, or guaranteed rights for each individual and each group,” he continues: “The United States in the past seemed to find the approach in terms of ‘guaranteed rights’ more congenial than the approach in terms of guaranteed shares; but recently Americans have begun to take individual rights less seriously, and to take group shares more seriously.” After I recovered from feeling sick at my stomach, I asked myself: What Americans has Mr. Glazer been observing or associating with? I do not know — but his statement is libel against an entire nation. His statement means that Americans are willing to sell their rights for money — for a “share of the pie.”
In his last paragraph Mr. Glazer observes that there was time when “the problems of Ethnicity, as a source of conflict within nations and between nations, have generally appeared as simply a left-over, an embarrassment from the past. It is my conviction they must now be placed at the very centre of our concern for the human condition.”
He is right to fear such a prospect.
There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred — brute, blind, virulent hatred — than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way — then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred is always the same. The worst kinds of atrocities were perpetrated during ethnic (including religious) wars. A recent grand-scale example of it was Nazi Germany.
Warfare — permanent warfare — is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe — with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development — is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War against other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.
There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule — since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind. A man of self-esteem will not accept the notion that the content of his mind is determined by his muscles, i.e., by his own body. But by the bodies of an unspecified string of ancestors? Determinism by the means of production is preferable; it is equally false, but less offensive to human dignity. Marxism is corrupt, but clean compared to the stale, rank, musty odor of ethnicity.
As to the stagnation under tribal rule — take a look at the Balkans. At the start of this century, the Balkans were regarded as the disgrace of Europe. Six or eight tribes, plus a number of sub-tribes with unpronounceable names, were crowded on the Balkan peninsula, engaging in endless wars among themselves or being conquered by stronger neighbors or practicing violence for the sake of violence over some microscopic language differences. “Balkanization” — the breakup of larger nations into ethnic tribes — was used as a pejorative term by the European intellectuals of the time. Those same intellectuals were pathetically proud when they managed, after World War I, to glue most of the Balkan tribes together into two larger countries: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. But the tribes never vanished; they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.
In the light of tribalism’s historical record, it is ludicrous to compromise with it, to hope for the best or to expect some sort of fair “group shares.” Nothing can be expected from tribalism except brutality and war. But this time, it is not with bows and arrows that the tribes will be armed, but with nuclear bombs.
As a tiny preview of what tribalism would mean in a modern, technological civilization, a story in The New York Times of January 23, 1977, reports that the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec had demanded the use of French in all official dealings, including at airports, but “a federal court upheld a ban by the federal Ministry of Transport on the use of French for landings at Montreal’s two international airports. (English is the language accepted at airports in every nation of the world.)”
Let me remind you of the recent terrible collision of two planes in the Canary Islands. Although all the personnel involved spoke English perfectly, the investigations seem to indicate that the collision was caused by linguistic misunderstandings. But what is that to the Canadians of Quebec, or to Idi Amin of Uganda, or to any other ethnic tribalists who might demand that their language be spoken by every plane pilot in the world? Incidentally, that collision took place because the small airport was overcrowded with planes that could not land at a nearby major airport: the major airport had been bombed by ethnic terrorists who were seeking the independence of the Canary Islands from Spain.
How long would the achievements of a technological civilization last under this sort of tribal management?
Some people ask whether local groups or provinces have the right to secede from the country of which they are a part. The answer is: on ethnic grounds, no. Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights. As to other than ethnic grounds, remember that rights belong only to individuals and that there is no such thing as “group rights.” If a province wants to secede from a dictatorship, or even from a mixed economy, in order to establish a free country — it has the right to do so. But if a local gang, ethnic or otherwise, wants to secede in order to establish its own government controls, it does not have that right. No group has the right to violate the rights of the individuals who happen to live in the same locality. A wish — individual or collective — is not a right.
Is there a way to avoid the rebirth of global tribalism and the approach of another Dark Ages? Yes, there is, but only one way — through the rebirth of the antagonist that has demonstrated its power to relegate ethnicity to a peaceful dump: capitalism.
Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness (which, in my sense of the term, it is) — yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.
Capitalism has been called a system of greed — yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
Capitalism has been called nationalistic — yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.
Capitalism has been called cruel — yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.
As to pride, dignity, self-confidence, self-esteem — these are characteristics that mark a man for martyrdom in a tribal society and under any social system except capitalism.
If you want an example of what had once been the spirit of America — a spirit which would be impossible today, but which we must now struggle to bring to a rebirth — I will quote from an old poem that represents the opposite of the abject self-abasement of ethnicity. It is a poem called “The Westerner” by Badger Clark.
He begins with “My fathers sleep on the Eastern plain and each one sleeps alone” — he acknowledges his respect for his forefathers, then says:
But I lean on no dead kin.
My name is mine for fame or scorn,
And the world began when I was born,
And the world is mine to win.
