TRIBES AND TRIBALISM

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 1, 2006

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

My parents are buried in one of the most picturesque settings I know. High in the Berkshire Mountains of rural Western Massachusetts is a modest little secluded cemetery at the end of a dead-end dirt road that no one could find unless you knew it was there. The cemetery is well over 200 years (maybe 300 years) old, and sometime in that history someone constructed one of those quaint New England stone fences to surround it.

Whenever I visit that cemetery, as I did this summer, I look at that stone wall in its various stages of disrepair and I think of the poem by Robert Frost. The wall is in need of mending, it seems, but then I wonder what it is walling in, or walling out, at the isolated spot near the top of a mountain.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost. The image that Frost painted in his poem was the annual ceremony performed by him and his neighbor when each spring they repaired the gaps that appeared over the year in a stone wall that separated their properties. Frost pondered on how the gaps appeared during the year. “No one has seen them made or heard them made,” he wrote, “But at spring mending-time, we find them there.” It seemed almost like a law of nature that these stone walls would regularly self-destruct, so Frost concluded that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” But he also contrasts that view with the conviction of his neighbor, who seemed to repeat in almost “mantra” form: “good fences make good neighbors.”

This poem also comes to mind when walls make international news, as they do from time to time. The most famous, perhaps, being the old Berlin Wall, the construction of which ushered in the Cold War and the dismantling of which announced the end of that era. Then there is the controversy of the newly constructed wall in Israel separating the Palestinian residents. And then there is the call by some in this country to construct a wall along our border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants.

Walls are made to keep people separate, under the theory that “good fences make good neighbors.” And yet they can also seem so artificial and troublesome that we are reminded of the fact that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In the long run, they are meant to fall down.

Frost, of course, was using the image of a stone wall to represent any artificial separation between one neighbor and another. In today’s world, our neighborhoods have grown wider and more diverse. In ways that were unheard of even when he was writing, our lives touch the lives of people all over the world.

Many years ago, a “neighborhood” included only people like us, people who believed and lived as we did, with the same religion, the same ethnic heritage, the same value system, and who were of the same economic class. Today, our neighbors are no longer just those people who live where we do and live like we do. Our neighbors stretch all over the globe and include people of many different backgrounds, cultures, and values. However, we still are busy building walls which separate us from others, usually, I think, out of the misguided fear that their way of living might threaten our way of living. Like Frost’s neighbor, we believe that “good fences make good neighbors.” Still, the poet insists there is something that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

When I was growing up in Anderson – a medium-sized town here in Central Indiana – there was very little attention paid to ethnic identity. In the earlier part of this century, hundreds of thousands of immigrants came to this country carrying their culture and language intact. The “melting pot” culture that many social observers hailed was not as evident in New York or Boston as it was in the interior cities such as where I grew up. I may be more naïve than others in my town, but only rarely do I remember that things were said about someone’s ethnic identity. I went to school with kids whose last names were Schneider and Sharnowski, O’Leary and McHenry, Hardaker and Papella. There were a few, though not many, Rosens and Kleins. By and large, as children, these surnames were not treated as being attached to any particular ethnic groups. The single glaring and regrettable exception to this generalization was the fact that Americans of African descent were treated as a separate and socially segregated ethnic group.

It was not until I moved after college to Washington, D.C. that I became aware that many people attached great significance to their ethnic identity. Many people took great pride in their heritage, whether it was Irish, Italian, Polish, Hispanic, Jewish, or whatever. This, for me, was a new and enlightening experience.

It was not until I moved to Chicago that I learned exactly how valuable that kind of identity became for so many. More than any other city I know, Chicago is built around the phenomenon of ethnic identity. Many neighborhoods are ethnically well defined and sometimes self-contained. This is a great aid in restaurant hunting, so that if one is in the mood for Italian food, you find the Italian neighborhood, or if it’s Hungarian food you crave, visit the Hungarian neighborhood. (In Indianapolis, if you crave Hungarian food, as I’ve been known to do, the only place to go is a Partner Church fundraising dinner at All Souls, prepared by the Schrementis).

What I have gradually come to believe, and what I am advocating in this sermon, is that the various tribal differences that define us – whether ethnic, religious, socio-economic, geographical, and so forth – can be very valuable in giving us a sense of personal identity and contribute to a healthy outlook and stable disposition toward living. There is nothing inherently wrong with a sense of “tribe.” What is unhealthy and destructive toward human growth and maturity, and what we in the liberal religious movement ought strongly to oppose wherever it rears its ugly head, is “tribalism,” the belief that one’s own tribe is somehow superior to other tribes, or that one ought not to associate with or try to cooperate with or attempt to exclude people from other tribes.

The United States has taken some pride in presenting itself as a “melting pot” of immigrants. That is a two-edged sword. It is true that, with the possible exception of Canada, we have succeeded more than anywhere else in blending diverse tribes of ethnic groups into a coherent society. Our goal has some glaring failures, of course. First among them is the racism that still infects our society as a legacy from slavery. Also the “war on terror” has made some Americans feel less than hospitable toward our Moslem citizens and neighbor. Even more recently, immigration issues and fears have turned an unfriendly face by some toward Hispanic Americans.

Nonetheless, with such important exceptions duly noted, we still aspire toward embracing diversity. It is a commendable aspiration.

The delicate balancing act, though, is to be able to affirm the sense of “tribe” – the beauty of differences that culture brings – but avoid the dangers of “tribalism” – the posturing of one tribe as better than another.

Even if we were able to overcome all obstacles in an effort to achieve a true “melting pot” society, the dangers of tribalism still tempt us. I hear the dangers of tribalism frequently – far too frequently. I hear it whenever we Americans speak of ourselves in superlative terms. Tribalistic language is familiar to us. Comments like:

Ø “America is the beacon of freedom to the whole world.”

Ø “Other countries are jealous of us; they want to be like us.”

Ø “Our relations with other nations should be guided primarily by our own national interests.”

Ø Or the ubiquitous: “Ours is the greatest nation on earth!”

This is the language of tribalism, the posturing of one’s own tribe over against other tribes. When tribalism is expressed by us, it is no different from when it was expressed by primitive prehistoric tribes, by ancient civilizations of Persia, by medieval European principalities, or by more modern imperialistic histories. It is all tribalism.

Tribalism is the greatest obstacle we have, and have always had, to a healthy and peaceful world.

Some years ago I mentioned on a Sunday that in seminary we were taught that the best sermons are ones whose point can be reduced to a single sentence. Since then a number of people have given me some good-natured kidding about that comment. Well, I find it particularly easy to reduce my comments this morning to only two sentences, though they have the advantage of being easy to understand: Tribes are good, and sometimes this is easy to forget. Tribalism is bad, and sometimes we don’t recognize its dangers. O.K., then, one sentence: tribes are good; tribalism is bad ( -- you have to use a semi-colon).

When I speak of “tribes” here, I refer in very general terms of those factors of our environment into which we were born that help us to define who we are. This is more than mere ethnicity, for although I myself cannot claim to own any purely ethnic heritage, I fined that I am a member of quite a few tribes.

Along with Kurt Vonnegut, I am a Hoosier, that is, I was born and raised in Indiana. Now, I am probably not going to impress people all over the world by that fact, yet I know that this will remain a part of my identity forever. In this morning’s reading, Vonnegut lampooned the notion that being a Hoosier was something very special, or that Hoosiers shared some kind of mystical connection with one another. It is true, though, that for me or anyone else to understand who I am, one must understand what it means to learn about the world from the perspective of a childhood in a medium-sized Indiana town. When I lived on the East Coast, and when I lived on the West Coast, I did feel a bit of kinship with other Hoosiers I would meet there.

I am also a member of that great tribe known as the American middle class. I don’t really know what it means to live as a poor person or, alas, as a rich one, but to understand who I am, I must understand what it means to be middle class.

I am also a member of the tribe known as “males,” and a subgroup within that tribe called “fathers.” This, too, is an important part of understanding who I am.

There are probably other tribes that I could mention, but I think you all get the idea. I will mention only one more example. I am a member of the tribe of liberal religion, organized under the movement known as Unitarian Universalists. Were I presently a member of some other religious tribe, I would be a very different person from the one I am today; in fact, it is safe to say, you probably would not be seeing me standing here right now.

In 1893, there was a World’s Fair in Chicago called the World Columbian Exposition. It was the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage. A major event of the Fair was the World Parliament of religions, organized by a group of liberal ministers, including a somewhat renegade Unitarian minister by the name of Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Shintos, Catholics, Unitarians and Universalists: for the first time in history, just about every religion from the world was represented in this dialogue to talk about their religion. When my professor at the University of Chicago described this event, he said that the purpose was to bring all the religions together to discover what they had in common, to discover how similar they were. Instead, they quickly found out how very different they were.

Some people would think that this means that the World Parliament of Religions of 1893 was a failure. On the contrary, it seems to me that it was a tremendous achievement to bring these various religious tribes together to share their differences. It would have been a mistake if the parties involved had sought to deny, to ignore, or to overlook their differences.

Years ago, when I left Chicago’s Hyde Park after graduating from seminary, I asked for advice about how to ease the moving transition for my six-year-old son. Someone suggested a going-away party for him, inviting all his friends from kindergarten. I will never forget that party, in a backyard of a Hyde Park home, with swings and slides. The guest list included a child from India, a Korean child, an Icelandic child, and African-American child, a child with mixed white-black parents, a Jewish child, and only one, if you’ll excuse the expression, WASP. There was a time when people tried to minimize the differences that are represented in such a group as this. It is true that the fundamental similarities abound. They are all children, they all enjoyed the same games, they all liked ice cream and cake, and they all, to varying degrees, knew how to give their parents headaches. But today, I think, we are learning to celebrate our differences, and each child was proud of his or her background and the parents nurtured a sense of identity with their tribe. Such a situation, I must stress, did not and should not prevent the children from playing with each other.

A healthy identity depends to a large degree upon how well one understands one’s various tribes. Whether we like it or not, our various tribes help to define who we are, and to ignore our tribal identities is to ignore a large part of our personal identity.

There is, it seems to me, another important function of our various tribes. Tribes often provide us with a sense of feeling “at home.” I think that this is important, and especially important in our modern society. Our society today is quite segmented, and people are very mobile, much less rooted than ever before. There are some very important advantages to this in that pluralism in our society offers us a great many more choices in living than were available for previous generations.

But there are some real disadvantages to this. In his book, The Homeless Mind, sociologist Peter Berger identifies the problem:

“Modernity has indeed been liberating. It has liberated human beings from the narrow controls of family, clan, tribe, or small community. It has opened up for the individual previously unheard of options and avenues for mobility. However, these liberations have had a high price. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is to refer to it as ‘homelessness.” … Modern (people have) suffered from a deepening condition of ‘homelessness.’ The correlate of the migratory character of (this) experience of society and of self has been what might be called metaphysical loss of ‘home.’ It goes without saying that this condition is psychologically hard to bear.”

The “homelessness” to which Berger refers involves a loss of, or a denial of, identity that tribes can help to supply. Many of the “identity crises” that people experience today result from the fact that we are confused over our proper tribal affiliation. Martin Marty, one of the best known observers of religious movements in this country, relates the following story about confronting an “identity crisis.”

“At a Roman Catholic University, not long after the Second Vatican Council, some students cheered a blasphemously furious ex-priest who was scorning the Mother Church. I asked them why the applause. ‘You’ll never understand,’ said one. ‘what an identity crisis the Catholic Church gave each one of us.’ I wondered aloud if they knew how lucky they were ever to have belonged to anything that was potent enough to give them identity over which to have a crisis.”

Coming to terms with one’s identity is not the only obligation of tribal membership. One must also seek to understand how to relate to members of other tribes. How do I, as a member of the middle class, relate to the poor and to the rich, even though I will never fully understand their experience of the world? How do I, as a man, understand and treat women? How do I, as a Unitarian Universalist, understand and treat Catholics, Muslims, and Baptists? It is at this juncture that the dangers of tribalism begin to take shape. It is here that we begin to build walls around us according to the false belief that “good fences make good neighbors.”

You probably all know someone like the person I know whom I’ll call “Sally.” I knew her when we both attended a Christian college. Sally did not like the Christians and talked about converting to Judaism. Eventually, though, she became a Buddhist, and went around trying to convert others to Buddhism. Sally transferred from our Christian college to a nearby state university where most of the students did not affiliate with any organized religion. Some time later, I ran in to her on that campus, and I saw her carrying a Bible. I asked if she was taking a course on Bible. “Bruce,” she said, “I’m a Christian. I gave my life to Jesus.” That was some time ago, now, and I have not heard from her since. But I would not be at all surprised if I discovered that during that time she had joined the Scientologists, the Moonies, and the Church of What’s Happening Now!

Sally, one might say, had an identity problem. She suffered from tribal confusion. She dealt with that confusion by believing that whatever tribe she was in at the moment was completely right, and other tribes were completely wrong. Her tribalism was a natural result of her tribal confusion.

There is nothing wrong with people holding on to the religion in which they were raised if that is where they find comfort and meaning. There is something very wrong when people cling to their particular religion as the ultimate truth and answer which everyone else must recognize. (This is as true for us as it is for other religious tribes.)

There is nothing wrong in people holding special feelings for the country in which they were born and in which they feel a sense of belonging. There is something very wrong when people think that this means their country is somehow superior to other countries or that their people are more important than other people. There is nothing wrong in people feeling a special sense of connectedness with others from their own tribe. There is something very wrong when people remain isolated within their own tribe, refusing to communicate with, cooperate with, and appreciate others who belong to different tribes.

By and large, Unitarian Universalists have a fairly good record in opposing manifestations of tribalism. What I am hoping, though, is that we can further learn to appreciate the value of tribes themselves, and understand how they can help us psychologically and emotionally to adjust to a world in which identities are constantly being confused.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote the poet. Robert Frost identified half the truth. The walls that separate tribes need to be dismantled, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot and should not appreciate the role that tribes themselves play in supplying a home and identity in a confused world. We can appreciate tribes, and at the same time work to overcome tribalism.

READING

“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go,

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is, we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

READING

From Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle

(In this scene from the novel, the narrator finds himself seated on an airplane next to an older couple, Lowe and Hazel Crosby. The narrator tells the story this way:)

Lowe Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

“My God,” she said, “are you a Hoosier?”

I admitted I was.

“I’m a Hoosier too,” she crowed. “Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I never knew anybody who was.”

“Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I’ve been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?”

“No.”

“He’s a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo. . .”

“Attaché.”

“He’s a Hoosier,” said Hazel. “And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia…”

“A Hoosier?” I asked.

“Not only him, but the Hollywood editor of Life magazine, too. And that man in Chile. . .”

“A Hoosier, too?”

“You can’t go anywhere a Hoosier hasn’t made his mark,” she said.

“The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier.”

“And James Whitcomb Riley.”

“I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers,” said Hazel, “but they’ve sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they’d be amazed.”

“That’s true,” I said.

She grasped me firmly by the arm. “We Hoosiers got to stick together.”

“Right.”

“You call me ‘Mom.’”

“What?”

“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me Mom.’”

“Uh huh.”

“Let me hear you say it,” she urged.

“Mom?”

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.