Author Topic: 2 - Tribe, Mismatch, and the Human Sociality Instinct  (Read 3580 times)

Matt Koeske

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2 - Tribe, Mismatch, and the Human Sociality Instinct
« on: June 26, 2011, 11:03:14 AM »
Tribe, Mismatch, and the Human Sociality Instinct

Although the above constitutes a personal area of interest and orientation for me (i.e., it concerns my personal identity and affiliations), the topics of tribe and identity extend much farther.  I am interested in understanding them as psychological phenomenon.  I didn't set out to investigate these phenomena, but they keep cropping up in all my other investigations.  The fact that other Jungians have been so profoundly resistant to discussing them with me only encourages me to think they are of special importance in any modern psychology.  My own inclination was always introverted and centered around mystical or transformative experience and trying to understand the Self and the autonomous psyche.  But although I feel I have learned quite a bit about this inner world and the Work of relating to and understanding it, discussing these things with others has always been difficult.  Even in the Jungian world, my experiences and investigations of the Self are unusual and very esoteric . . . and generally foreign and largely incomprehensible to more conventional Jungians.

Trying to understand why this seemed to be the case drove me outward and toward the study of the way identity is formed and how human sociality organizes group identity, behavior, and interaction.  These studies are ongoing, and although I have learned a great deal (perhaps enough to suggest a quasi-original theory or novel understanding of identity is emerging), I continue to learn how much more there is to learn about this vast subject that has been explored by numerous fields (e.g., sociology, psychology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and various humanities fields, to name only some).  Each field (and every individual subset of each field) has its own historical approach, ideas, and jargon for talking about culture and identity.  Often the same words mean different things to different thinkers, depending on what field or school of thought they affiliate with.

My starting point is ignorance and intuition cultivated by personal experience (one of the reasons I opened this introduction with some of my observations about Jungian tribe and identity).  My goal is not to make a theory or innovate academically.  I don't suppose that I have anything new to offer.  I want merely to understand the phenomena of tribe and identity as well as I can.  But I have yet to encounter ideas that are precisely like the hypotheses emerging from my investigation.  Very similar, yes.  But not exactly the same.  As far as I am aware, I have no strong affiliations with any of the fields that investigate culture and identity.  My Jungian affiliation (as explained above) gives me no basis at all to understand culture outside of the generally antagonistic attitude that Jungianism has toward modernity (an attitude that I have numerous disagreements with but which still affects me to the degree that I find modern individuals somewhat displaced in modern culture).

Similar to this Jungian take on modernity (as the period where archetypal symbols are disintegrating) is the so-called mismatch theory of evolutionary psychology.  Mismatch theory suggests that humans evolved to be adapted to an environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) that did not resemble the modern environment in many ways.  Modern culture exploded and developed more rapidly than many human traits could adapt (others contest this; see for instance The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Cochran and Harpending, 2010).  As a result, humans exhibit many "instinctual" tendencies that are relatively maladaptive in our modern environment.

My assumption is that, at least in certain ways, mismatch theory is valid.  One has to be very careful not to overextend it or use it to prescribe or proscribe various behaviors.  Mismatch theory is not dependent on (as Cochran and Harpending and other critics of the EEA theory suggest) all human traits having involved in a specific ancestral environment.  As EEA proponents repeated state, every trait has its own EEA.  In other words, its own situational history, its own environmental pressures and "designers".  To the degree evolutionary theory is correct (and it is accepted as a scientific fact among scientists), EEA theory is correct.  But, what precisely the EEA of a trait was is often very difficult to ascertain . . . and therein lies the problem for EEA theory that invites criticism from skeptics.

But what I am more interested in is how potential mismatches in the modern environment affect individuals.  I don't want to get too bogged down speculating about what precise EEAs were like (although this is sometimes unavoidable).  Rather, I'm inclined to follow the anxiety.  What aspects of modern living seem to generate the most anxiety and mental illness?  This can be more difficult to determine than it first seems.  For instance, it is quite likely that in any human society, individuals with the lowest status typically have the highest anxiety.  We know this to be true in some other primate societies where higher amounts of chemicals released during increased anxiety were found in the feces of lower status individuals (Baboon Metaphysics: the Evolution of a Social Mind by Cheney and Seyfarth, 2008).  So, in any investigation of how the role of status worked in prehistoric societies compared to how it works in modern societies would have to take this into account.  It could very well be that prehistoric human societies were more egalitarian than massive modern societies.  And to the degree that this was true, it could set the stage for an instance of mismatching leading to increased anxiety in moderns.  But without firsthand knowledge of prehistoric societies, there is always a fair amount of speculation involved in such hypotheses.

One thing we know with reasonable certainty is that prehistoric, pre-modern human societies were tribal, probably kin-based, probably nomadic, and survived by gathering, hunting, and scavenging.  It was not until the agricultural revolution (about 10,000 BP) that humans developed the necessary technologies to increase population density in a way that led to the first city-states.  Therefore, I am working from the assumption that the EEA for human sociality was the tribe.  But this assumption is only relevant if we are able to determine that humans have not evolved significantly where their instinctual sociality is concerned.  And that is a matter for much debate and that has no clear answers.

What we do know is that we have inherited a very specific myth of modern civilization that includes the idea that human culture's move into modernity is evolutionary and progressive.  But it is just as common for this myth to be accompanied by a counter myth of Fall from grace (such as the Garden of Eden story from Genesis).  The myth of civilization is typically characterized by the "hero's journey", and the implication is that modern civilization was created heroically by great men (always men, never women) who overcame instinctual fears and temptations to do great things, especially the invention and employment of new technologies and the founding of powerful, usually heavily militant city-states.

My starting point and suggestion is that we attempt to put aside this inherited mythology as much as possible when trying to understand the human sociality instinct and its potential role in modern living.  I seriously doubt there is much validity to these myths in the same way I seriously doubt that superheroes exist.  We simply don't see these great heroes today.  Those "heroes" we do see succeed in their projects largely within the confines of modern culture.  They do not create new and truly post-modern cultures by force of will.

Also, closer inspection of the hero's journey motif shows that it likely predates modernity and is prehistoric.  The initiation of tribal shamans (generally believed to exist tens of thousands of years before city-states) is the original archetype for the hero's journey.  The modern patriarchal hero tales adopt this older theme very generally but also make important revisions.  For instance, in the modern heroic theme, the hero often conquers aggressive and unruly nature in the form of a monster or dragon.  In shamanic initiation, the initiate, if s/he should face any monsters, typically endures being devoured and digested or else outwits and escapes or negotiates peace with them.  Also, in the modern hero myth, the hero is always male, and although many tribal cultures have only male shamans, shamanism is not exclusively and everywhere a male enterprise.  Another difference can be seen in the conclusions of these stories.  In shamanic initiations, despite being devoured or dismembered, the shaman survives or is reborn and returns to the world of the living with special powers or insights.  But in modern hero myths, the hero is ultimately killed by a fatal flaw or secret weakness (often arrogance or aggression or cruelty).  He does not, for instance, manage to achieve eternal life . . . which is one of the primary ambitions of modern heroes.

My contention is that the emergence of modern culture was accidental and the product of numerous factors that humans did not heroically determine.  But the way technologies empowered certain individuals led to an increased sense of hubris and the belief that what we make can entitle us to what had previously been considered godlike status and mastery over the world/nature/others.  But I see implicit in mismatch theory the likelihood that modernity was thrust upon us . . . and continues to be thrust upon us in ways that can make the simple act that every other living thing on this planet can manage effortlessly often just beyond our grasp.  Namely, being what they are.  For us, being human can be the greatest challenge we face.  And yet, we simultaneously fail to transcend our humanness, even when we utterly devote ourselves to the task.

I have made two fundamental observations of human sociality as I've experienced and studied it.  First, humans are still profoundly and compulsively tribal in the ways they socialize.  Second, the impetus of modern society is a-tribal.  Another myth of modern society (especially in the present era) is that the individual is the fundamental unit of social importance.  Since the Enlightenment, this has especially become the focus of our sense of rights and entitlement and protections by and from the state and from others.  Few would contest that the rise of modern democracy has been an improvement over previous dictatorships and monarchies, but the emphasis on the individual also turns our attention away from our groups or tribes.  But distracted from tribal focus as we often are, this has not deterred tribal behavior and thinking.  Tribalism continues to emerge and self-organize.  A primary difference is that instead of individuals belonging to one tribe only, now they belong to many simultaneously.  Or, we could even say that many tribes simultaneously belong to each individual.

So another piece of my hypothesis is that "cultural evolution" has not seen human sociality transform from a tribalism to a nationalism.  Rather, we have maintained tribalism but adapted a kind of polytribalism.  I will explore this in more detail in subsequent posts, as it is a contentious idea.  But for the sake of this introduction, I'd like to move on to suggest that this polytribalism had to evolve because tribalism was simply too essential to our species, too deeply rooted in our instinctual framework.  Polytribalism doesn't force significant changes upon tribalism or upon the mind human sociality instinct.
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