Tribe – Sebastian Junger (4th Estate 2016)

The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively…it is predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group.

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In his ‘Author’s Note’ Junger explains how this short book grew out of an article he wrote on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in war veterans. He develops his ideas about PTSD into an interesting theory on modern society that combines anecdote with anthropology and psychology with politics.

He argues that the tribe – defined as a community for which an individual is willing to make a ‘substantive sacrifice’ – is the reason for the success of hominids, and for some of our evolutionary traits. Historically it was the communities which were better at cooperating (particularly when hunting or defending) that thrived while the less ‘tribal’ ones died out. Direct observations of native American tribal life stress its powerful lure; Benjamin Franklin claimed that an ‘Indian child’ raised by white settlers who reunites with the tribe will not leave it again; however, a white captive ‘liberated’ from Indians will ‘take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.’

Junger also cites research into depression and suicide rates indicating ‘remarkably little evidence of depression-based suicide in tribal societies’, along with sociologist Emile Durkheim’s finding that ‘when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped.’ Moreover, it suggests that community-mindedness spikes during disasters: a threat multiplies the number of ‘prosocial’ acts which, in turn, makes individuals within the threatened community happier. Thus, during the Blitz ‘voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined’ and instances of depression declined in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There is even anecdotal evidence of community members harking back to the ‘happier days’ of hardship, when curfews, nightly bombings and food shortages were the norm.

This irony – of unhappy situations increasing happiness – seems to be underpinned by social and neuroscience. As Junger notes, in acting ‘prosocially’ an individual is ‘rewarded not only by group approval but also by an increase of dopamine and other pleasurable hormones.’ These situations offer better environments for humans to meet the three basic needs for contentment (according to ‘self-determination’ theory): feeling competent at what they do; feeling authentic in their lives; and feeling connected to others.

However, affluent modern societies tend to provide environments that do the opposite. They are the inverse of the ‘community of sufferers’ in which individuals experience ‘an immensely reassuring connection to others’; they rarely offer ‘the close-knit group that humans evolved for.’ Instead, they are unequal, divided, contemptuous of difference, and therefore they promote self-interest. According to this view, modern society is ‘antihuman’ – it focuses on what separates rather than binds us. And so the argument runs that the experience of war veterans who return to society and then suffer from PTSD reveal not their own problems, but society’s. Having experienced the binding elimination of difference that successful fighting requires (and humans have evolved to prioritise – ‘altruistic group defence’) they find the conditions are such that they cannot live in the society they were prepared to die for. It is sobering to read that following 9/11 was when the US last experienced the kind of unity it enjoyed after WWII.