Tribalism, as Harvey Whitehouse explains in his feature article, “Rise of the Teratribe” (New Scientist, June 22, 2024), has been a fundamental cohesive force in the making of human societies. “A visceral sense of oneness with the group” is a force that psychologists and anthropologists call “identity fusion”. It makes us into the social units that then function for our individual and collective survival.
Prior to the Agricultural Revolution of 12,000 years ago, the family group and then the tribe were the organizing principles of societies for millennia. Their size was determined by the limited number of people who could be known and trusted—about 50 is the number that we can know well, and about 150 is the limit of those with whom we can stay closely connected.
As we moved away from hunting and foraging to agriculture, excess food allowed us to form larger communities. About 7,000 years ago, according to Whitehouse, we were able to form communities of thousands, or kilotribes. Organizing this many people into societies required more sophisticated and complex connective structures, and the identify fusion to create collective behaviour was supplied by more abstract bonds such as similar ethics and established laws.
About 4,500 years ago, as populations increased, these kilotribes merged into megatribes of millions, and became what we now call civilizations. But identity fusion continued to be the bonding force forming people into identifiable groups that nurtured collective behaviour, usually powerful enough that individual people would be willing to die for the wellbeing of the megatribe. The skirmishes and killings that were common in family and tribal structures became wars for not only territory but for symbols and glory. The megatribe psychology has, in our modern era, taken the form of nations.
According to Whitehouse, the megatribe is now moving in the direction of the teratribe, the billions of us who now comprise a planet interconnected by travel, trade and all the other forms of communication that dissolve the distances between us. We are even able to view Earth from the distance of space, and with a perspective that eliminates the artificial borders separating one nation from another. As in a tribal structure, we can now perceive ourselves as one human family, not alive in the wonder of a local forest or savannah, but in the vastness and tumult of an endless universe.
The United Nations is the early manifestation of this notion of a teratribe. We try to come to agreements that impose restraints on individual nations for the benefit of other communities such as indigenous people, and those of ethnic, cultural or religious differences. We are trying to make trade more sensitive to the wellbeing of others. Wars are to be avoided, but even then certain rules of conflict are to be respected. Lines of communication are kept open in the hope of averting misunderstandings that would lead to catastrophic consequences.
We also know that whatever we do in one place on the planet affects what happens elsewhere. Earth is round, and its ecologies are interconnected. The megatribes of nations are being forced to understand themselves as a part of the teratribe that inhabits the entire planet. This includes not only individual humans, but the plants and animals that constitute the entire biosphere. The old subdivisions that separated families and tribes are now becoming a planetary awareness that encompasses the entire biosphere. We live or die as one collective whole.
We are even bonding with different species. We used to shoot orcas with 50-calibre machine guns, and kill whales with harpoons; now we are counting their precarious numbers, monitoring their travel, fretting over their health, and then revelling in the excitement of meeting them in their natural environments. We struggle to bring species back from the brink of extinction, a clear realization that their loss is a diminishment of ourselves.
And we are learning that climate change is a threat to the entirety of both the planet and the teratribe. The carbon dioxide that we emit anywhere affects the ecologies and the weather everywhere. We know this. But the identity fusion hasn’t yet entered us deeply enough to inspire the bonding that we once had with our local ecologies, our families and our tribes. Until we are feeling this loyalty rather than just thinking it—until we experience this larger fusion that connects us to the living biosphere and the human family of which we are a part—we will continue on our stumbling journey toward an unfolding disaster. And then, perhaps, at some anxious time in an uncertain future—in the tattered remnants of what was once a healthy planet and a thriving teratribe—a mythology will recount a temptation and a folly that has stained all humanity with a collective guilt.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Crowd scene – Photo by Hannah Rodrigo on Unsplash