When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.
Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work, probably. You were probably raised in one.
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
Nonetheless. Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.” Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.
Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case. But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling.
Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet. But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism.
OK, I’m rereading this, and I should add an addendum, because this is important and I feel bad about eliding it earlier.
For those of you who are, e.g., raising children or planning to do so: my point is definitely not that all (nuclear) family environments are psychologically horrible. It is not even that it is impossible to have a (nuclear) family that shows respect for its members’ individual autonomy, etc. You can definitely do those things. I have seen people who do. Those people are heroes.
But it is so costly! It is so difficult! God, it is one of the hardest and most expensive projects ever undertaken by man. It basically entails saying “we are going to pour all our resources into one or two or three children, we are going to give them claims on every part of us, and we are going to ask nothing in return. We are going to strip our souls and our bank accounts bare for people whom we fully expect may up and leave us because they will want to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams.”
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this. Most families expect payment in devotion for their care, according to the ancient tribal logic. And the bigger and more extended your family is, the stronger the pull of that tribal logic will be.