Us and Them; Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Excerpted from
Us and Them; Understanding Your Tribal Mind
By David Berreby

In the spring of 2004, the Republican Party of Illinois found itself with a problem. Its nominee in the upcoming election for the U.S. Senate, Jack Ryan, had been severely embarrassed by revelations about his sexual tastes contained in five-year-old divorce papers. It was bad news for a party that had already been tarnished by corruption charges two years earlier against the state's Republican governor, George Ryan (who was no relation).

Jack Ryan dropped out of the race. One party official, discussing its search for a replacement, told reporters, "We're just not going to ever nominate a guy named Ryan again."

You know he was kidding. No one would say in earnest that unrelated people, who happen to share a name, will all be tarnished politicians. The hidden rules of human kinds tell you to reject the thought. If you want to understand those rules, then, the question is: How do you know that?

Imagine, for instance, that the two Ryans were relatives. Refusing to nominate another person from the same family might or might not be unfair, but it doesn't feel absurd. Maybe there's a family problem, after all. So part of the grammar of human kinds says some categories, like family connection, tell a lot about their members. Others, like a shared name, are not informative. We don't have to think about this distinction. The mind observes the rule without any conscious thought.

Your first hunch might be to say that this rule is founded in objective fact. There are accidental human kinds, like people who have the same last name, and then there are "real" human kinds, like the Ryan family - or the Dar al Islam, the worldwide community of Muslims, or the nation of Senegal. Accidental human kinds tell you nothing about the people who have been thrown into them, then, but the "real" kinds tell a lot. That's reassuring. But it cannot be right.

Consider a human kind in whose meaning people certainly have confidence: France. Most of us would say that French people and French culture have persisted for ages. Yet it is hard to say what, exactly, has done this persisting.

Millions of today's French people trace their roots to recent ancestors who lived far from their country (including, for example, the nation's interior minister and potential future president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose father's family, until his generation, was Hungarian). So the common ground of Frenchness is not in DNA. Nor can the essence be linked to territory: Until a few hundred years ago, nations were not politically important human kinds. In premodern Europe, as one historian has written, rulers were "kings of peoples, not of regions. A king of the Goths was king of the Goths whether they were settled on the shores of the Baltic, the Black Sea, or the Bay of Biscay. ... A kingdom was composed of people who recognized a certain royal family as their royal family, just as a kin-group was composed of people who recognized the founders of a certain family as their common ancestors."

Then, too, the French language of, say, 1431, is not spoken today. That's a fact about language change of which medieval writers were well aware. As Dante noticed in the fourteenth century, "if those who died a thousand years ago were to return to their cities, they would believe that these had been occupied by some foreign people, because the language would be at variance with their own." And what the world knows as French cuisine didn't exist then, either. In fact, all the indicators that identify a human kind are different now than they were in the century when Joan of are fought for her sovereigns kingdom. If she could return to her cities, would this religious warrior feel solidarity with the church-shunning, marriage-avoiding, war-hating people she likely would meet? Not probable. So when we say that France has endured - "the same soul which spans the generations, constantly rejuvenating but always the same," as one French writer put it - what, exactly, are we talking about?

"There are few questions more curious than this" wrote the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, in a prescient essay on "national characters." Because he wrote more than 250 years ago, his descriptions of "nations" now exemplify the problem: "We have reason to expect greater wit and gaiety in a Frenchman than in a Spaniard . . . and an Englishman will naturally be supposed more knowledgeable than a Dane." Then, too, everyone knew that Spaniards and Chinese manifest "gravity and serious deportment," quite unlike those merry French, Egyptians, and Persians.

Anticipating, as he often did, more recent thinkers, Flume noted that peoples who live near each other without mixing often show-extremes of difference. His illustration was the integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, another serious people, versus the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the Greeks.

None of this - serious Spaniards, solemn Turks, cowardly Greeks, laugh-a-minute Persians, dumb Danes - rings true today. Hume foresaw that. "The manners of a people," he wrote, "change very considerably from one age to another." Reaching for an explanation, he uncharacteristically threw up his hands. The change must be caused "either by great alterations in their government, by the mixtures of new people, or by that inconstancy, to which all human affairs are subject."

That frustrating mutability is the root of the Joan of are problem: How can all signs of Frenchness change over the centuries, while Frenchness stays, somehow, the same? This was the real mystery, Hume saw, even though many thought the problem was elsewhere. Though he made short work of their mistakes, every one of the errors he identified is still common today.

For one thing, Hume wrote, uneducated people expected every single Dane or Frenchman to display the traits that defined Denmark and France, but that was an error. "Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments" he wrote. They recognized that "some particular qualities are more frequently to be met among one people than among their neighbors." (His example was the then well-known "fact" that the Swiss are more honest than the Irish.) You're more likely to be cheated in Ireland than in Switzerland, Hume thought, but still there are forthright Irishmen and sneaky Swiss. Human kinds aren't logical definitions. They're statements about probability.

Another common mistake, Hume saw, was to think differences among peoples were based on physical facts about them - their climate, or body types, or the food they ate. After all, nations change even when their physical environment does not, and people are often different from their ancestors, as children are from parents. (The Enlightenment English admired the ancient Greeks, for instance, while thinking the contemporary ones were less impressive than those somber Turks.) But the more important reason that the traits of human kinds could not derive from physical causes, Hume noted, was that many of these groupings were scattered all over the earth, experiencing different environments, yet all displaying their defining traits.

After all, there is nothing special about nations as a basis for organizing human kinds. That was why in his essay on differences among countries Hume also ponders what we would now call races ("Negroes," he was "apt to suspect," were "naturally inferior to the whites"), and ethnic groups (like the Jews, who, he wrote, are prone to fraud, or the Armenians, who are uncommonly honest). A line of work, too, produces a reliable human kind, no matter where in the world those people are. For example, soldiers (whom Flume rather liked) are different everywhere from priests (whom he didn't like at all).