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.
I understand what you’re trying to get at here, but I think that your statement is massively warped by the bubble effect of rationalist-adjacency. This line in particular:
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.
… is the exact opposite of my lived experience. Yes, here on Tumblr (in general) and on rationalist-adjacent spaces (in particular) people complain about their families all the time, and a very high percentage of people are estranged from their families to some degree. But the families that I actually know IRL have basically none of this. As in, literally 0% of the families that I know in person fit the description of families that you have given above, and I can think of exactly one (1) living family member in my family or any other that I know who has members that are estranged from them in the way that the typical rat or rat-adjacent blogger claims to be.
And these are the American families. The Romanian families that I know are even more close-knit and have even lower rates of significant failure. This doesn’t mean that my family and the families around me are free of conflict or exist in lock-step conformity. But it does mean that they’re mostly agreeable most of the time, so that the benefits of the family/tribal structure dramatically outweigh the costs.
So my empirical observation is that, in fact, families are generally successful, and that the notable failures are much rarer than the everyday successes.
Nonetheless, the observation that
most of you fled from the bosom of your familiesis probably accurate if “you” is understood to refer to the actual readers of your blog. But this is an artifact of the fact that rationalism and its orbit tends to attract people who (1) have bad families, or (2) have families in which they fit poorly (usually because of some combination of autism, trans, and gay). But this does not generalize to the rest of the world.Your addendum also seems to be setting up a false dilemma, in which families are either authoritarian micro-managers or individualist launching-pads with no long-term claims on their members. Every family that I know well falls between these extremes. In my family, no one ever put any restriction on our choice of career or spouse or place of residence; but my parents do in fact expect to be “repaid in devotion”, in that they expect that I’ll call them on their birthday and send Christmas presents and come to visit with their grandkids as often as is feasible. This is a totally non-onerous and reasonable expectation. Honestly, I think my parents would be reasonable to expect a lot more than they do, and they deserve every ounce of devotion with which I repay them.
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this.
If “this” is equal to individualist launching-pad, then you are correct. But the happy medium that I described above? Is in fact quite common, and is not especially difficult nor heroic nor rare.
I know that not everyone is this lucky. But everyone should be. My brand of social conservativism could be pretty well summed up with the terminal goal of “give everyone a family as good as mine”, whereas I look at what you’ve written and it sounds like “destroy one of the most functional institutions we have left”.
There’s a lot to discuss here, and I’ll try to come back and reply more fully when I have more time / wherewithal. But a few notes on critical points:
1. Most importantly – the starting place for this argument was not “should we destroy the (modern First World) families we have because they are horrible?” That’s an, um, interesting question, I guess, but no one was asking it. Rather, we started with: “liberal society is full of anomie and loneliness, should we try to fix it by making it more tribal?” And it seems clear, to me, that actual tribal embeddedness has colossal underappreciated costs, and that families these days are as functional as they are (however functional you believe that to be) largely because of checks on their power and influence imposed by social individualism.
2. Yes, I am expecting that most of my readers are rat-adjacent or similar types – in other words, idiosyncratic people with idiosyncratic needs and ambitions who are bad at small-scale social politics, also known as “the specific people for whom family life is most likely to go very very wrong” – and that their best outcomes will look different from those of the average citizen.
3. Despite the above, when I talk about tribal existence causing problems, I am not actually (mostly) talking about the kind of problems so terrible that they lead to total estrangement and sustained overt hostility. As you say, that is pretty rare. (Although it does happen, and when it happens it matters.) It is much more common, e.g., for adult Americans to be semi-regularly interacting with their parents, but to find these interactions somewhat annoying and somewhat straining to a substantial and predictable degree, in a way that their interactions with chosen friends are not. As far as that goes, it’s fine, the costs are pretty low (and the remaining benefits of family can be substantial). If your agenda is “let’s refocus our society so that relationships of that kind have a lot more power,” the costs may not remain so low.