1 THE TRIBE DRIVE



What Is Tribalism and Why Does It Matter?

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species.

—Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, 1993

The science is out. Every citizen has an obligation to understand our drives.

—Geoffrey Miller, 2019

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.

—Carl Jung, 1951

What do you think of when you hear the word tribalism?

You may have a hunch, but the word is now used in so many varying contexts by media talking heads, podcasters, and everyday people that it has almost lost its meaning. For many, it conjures images of racism and sectarian violence, playing in a constant loop on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. They may see leaders mobilizing their supporters by pitting the differences of one group against another in a zero-sum political game. For others, though, the first thoughts may be of their own group. They may envision community, family, and faith. It may remind them of the bonds of loyalty that bind us all together, or a true friend demonstrating personal sacrifice and benevolence in a way that blood relations would be pressed to match. There is an element of tribalism in all of these things, but let me tell you what I see from my perspective as an evolutionary anthropologist.

I see a band of Paleolithic humans dancing and singing in a ring around a fire. I see a mother nursing her infant and handing it off to another camp member so that she can attend other business. I see a hunter sharing his prize of meat with an infirm grandmother. Juxtaposing these images of altruism, I also see the very first moment where a human murdered another human not of “their kind” in cold blood. I see a band of men with sharpened wooden spears and flint-knapped handaxes circling the foraging camp of a rival group in the night, waiting to ambush, kill, or abduct any who may wander out alone.

Beyond these visions of our prehistoric past, I see a twenty-first- century single mother, lonely and exhausted from another sleepless night with her newborn; a Wednesday-night bowling team in matching jerseys celebrating after making a tournament-winning strike; a socially isolated teenage boy entering a school with a loaded semiautomatic rifle. I see churchgoers, soccer hooligans, and suicide bombers. I see Donald Trump and the populism that fueled his rise to presidency, and his followers cheering at rallies and storming the U.S. Capitol.

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than does your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?

The Tribe Drive is coalitionary instinct. Specifically, it is the instinct to belong to a nested group—a tribe—that uses symbols that represent a shared reality to identify membership. For good or ill, we all have it. This instinct ignores your political affiliation and cares little for the color of your skin or the gender you identify with. It stays with you from the time you are born to the time that you die. It disregards whether you are rich or poor. It scoffs at your intelligence—and may even use your formal education against you, allowing you to craft more convincing narratives to justify your actions. Surprisingly, neither expertise, intelligence, numeracy, nor political ideology serve as an inoculation to being tribal.1 Studies show that people with specialized training become better at deceiving themselves and others when truth conflicts with their prior beliefs. In other words, the Tribe Drive is indiscriminate.

Tribalism is the worst kind of manifestation from the Tribe Drive. It is the belief that different identity-based coalitions possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. Sound familiar? It should. If racism is the belief that skin color can distigiush people as superior or inferior, then tribalism—using skin color as a predictive factor in group identity—is the root code of this phenomenon. This is profound because if we want to solve racism, we have to understand tribalism. You and every person you interact with emit and receive signals embedded with coalitionary information that shape our behavior, and this behavior spills into our social networks and societies. On a daily basis, I take note and register tribalism’s influence on myself and others. This book is about why this matters and why it should matter to you.

In the coming chapters, we will explore the science of how various human drives manifest in distinct behaviors. We will also investigate the anthropological definition of a tribe, and how belonging to one is not always a matter of personal choice. Nor is it only the purview of a handful of people, to be determined by legislators and judicial systems or social justice advocates. Belonging to a tribe is, in fact, the birthright of every human being. One of the most pressing challenges to becoming masters of our drives—not mastered by them—is knowing they exist in the first place. In this chapter, we will uncover the nature of the imperceptibility of the dispositions that influence our behavior. Ultimately, this knowledge will be essential in improving our moral landscapes.

Deconstructing My Tribalism

Looking back now, over the span of my lifetime, the Tribe Drive has been the unseen force lurking in the shadows of not only my origin story, but also some of its most critical, identity-shaping moments. Now I see these moments in a new light; they carry with them through time important lessons, harbored in secret for years until I learned the code to unlock their deeper meanings.

My Conception

My French-Canadian grandfather, Roland Samson, was born in 1928. My Catholic great-grandparents—Emilio and Laura Samson—had twelve children in all, and Roland was the eighth. In 1979, my mother, Dana Monroe, fell in love with my father, Daniel Samson, son of Roland, in part because they were both attending the same religious college. Religious devotion is a theme in the Samson family tree. In fact, my great-grandfather Emilio’s faith at the time forbade the use of contraceptives, which explains in part why they had twelve children, a number unheard of nowadays. My father, in seeking a partner, was hoping to marry one who shared his devotion and religious affiliation. Group affiliation—in this case, religion—brought me into the world as a Samson.

Lesson: Group affiliation guides and drives reproduction.

My First Memory

I watch with some measure of awe as my father stands upon the dais and speaks to hundreds of his parishioners. He leans on a podium embossed with a golden icon of a lion, a boy, and a lamb, symbolizing the millennial age and the coming of Christ. The parishioners look up to him and listen in rapt attention. Moreover, this is an international affair. We are in Martinique, a Caribbean island that’s part of the Lesser Antilles, for a church “feast.” Even as a young boy, I am struck by the human diversity of the crowd. As with all good shamans, my father nourishes the souls of those in attendance with homiletical concepts of group unity under one ultimate God. The final goal (highlighted from sermon to sermon) is that of worldwide peace when evil will be destroyed, and the “lamb” (Christ) will come back to rule, paradoxically, with a rod of iron as all nations submit to his will.

Lesson: Religion is a powerful group adhesive and tribal signal.

My First Fight

My family is transferred by the church from New Brunswick, Canada, a primarily English-speaking province, to French Québec. There, as a newly minted fourth grader in a Quebecois French–dominant elementary school, I am standing in defiance of an older, stronger fifth-grade bully. Being one of the only English-speaking kids at my school, my poor French language skills make me an easy target on the playground. I am being goaded into a fight. I have yet to back down, but I don’t dare throw a punch. “Are you a pussy, you little English piece of shit!?” He launches a punch and I take it in the stomach, doubling over. His friends laugh as he continues to throw blows on my hunched-over body.

Lesson: Language is a powerful coalitional identifier.

My First Friendships

I am kneeling in the dusty basement of my best friend’s home. Metallica’s heavy metal ballad “Nothing Else Matters” plays in the background. A stainless steel sword tip touches my left shoulder, then my right, and then after an ascending arc, comes to rest on a lock of unkempt teenage hair. “Arise, Sir Davers, a [redacted] of the order of [redacted].” We share a sacred, secret handshake known only to our group. The ritual complete, I stand and am embraced by my fictive kin—family by choice, not genealogy. I feel a love and acceptance identical to familial bonds. These first true, time- and stress-tested friends remain by my side and to this day call me “Davers.” Our secret society, I would learn only as an anthropologist much later, is called a sodality and serves a critical survival function on the band level of tribes.

Lesson: Ritual, symbols, music, codes, and nicknames sum up to make a group’s creed. This creed functions as a proof of group membership.

My Early Awakening

I am twelve years old. My father leaves a book on my nightstand: Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. After several days of it collecting dust, I take it with me to school and begin reading the thrilling saga that starts with the origin of the Earth and ends with the evolution of our species. Little do I know that this book is destined to alter the course of both my life and my father’s. For my father, the book served as the catalyst to the ontologically shocking realization that his fundamentalist church was in error in denying the fact of evolution. Despite the trepidation that came with having to retrain for another career in order to support our family, this would lead to his decision in 1999 to resign his ministry.

Lesson: Even the strongest of tribal allegiances, grounded in the most profound sense of fundamentalist faith, are not immutable. If we no longer identify with a creed, we can relinquish its identity and find a new one.

My First Love

Tears well up in my eyes as the first woman I ever loved tells me: “David, it can’t work. We can’t be together. You believe in evolution. I don’t. Our children would be confused. We can’t live a life together…” After the encounter, I am driving home in the darkness of Indiana on a backwoods road. It is raining hard, making it difficult to see. The weeping becomes so uncontrollable that I have to pull over for fear of veering off into a ditch. I spend the night alone in the car awash in the anguish of loss.

Lesson: Your ideological belief system, a cornerstone of tribal identity, will influence whom you will love.

My First Win

It is the Southern Indiana football sectional championship, and we are playing on our home turf—Lidey Field at Castle High School in Newburgh, Indiana. I am the starting defensive end for the Knights; the jersey I am wearing features a proud blue-and-gold motif. There are only a few seconds left on the clock and we are up by three points. It is fourth down, and only several yards to the end zone. Harrison High School’s dangerous and agile quarterback snaps the ball; I speed off the line of scrimmage far to the outside of the offensive tackle I had been fighting all game, and as he overcompensates his speed to catch up, I throw an uppercut move to his torso that uses his own momentum against him, sending him crashing to the ground. It is just me and the elusive quarterback now, and every sense in my body is tingling. I am completely focused on him. I send him crashing to the ground with the game- winning sack. I am lifted up by my teammates, and ten thousand screaming fans in attendance share in the sense of victory and conquest that we, “the us-es,” are having at the expense of “the thems,” our fallen enemy. Until that moment in life, I had never felt such glory, never felt such power or sense of purpose.

Lesson: Enacting socially sanctioned physical violence on behalf of one group over another can be intoxicating, thereby reinforcing an addictive quality to the behavior.

My First Political Debate with a Friend

I am shocked! One of my closest, most cherished friends is attacking me with conservative talking points about fiscal responsibility and barbs against the welfare state. I am in a debate with someone whom I love like a brother and whose intellect I respect, yet I feel—to the very core of my being—that he couldn’t possibly be more wrong. I think to myself: How can someone so smart be on the wrong side of history? Being an anthropology graduate student, I have, up to this point, been baptized as a hardcore card-carrying liberal, and I viciously, with no small measure of righteousness, counter with my side’s political talking points. He looks disgusted, an expression I had never witnessed coming from him before. For the first time in my life, I feel a fracture in a cherished relationship and leave the debate angry and confused.

Lesson: If identity is in question, group ideology has the power to fracture historically strong relationships.

My First Hobby

I am on a field of battle, with a thousand other warriors dressed in full plate and leather armor, in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. Every year a crowd of twenty thousand congregate for two weeks in what is the equivalent to the Burning Man of medieval martial arts, called Pennsic.* Savage blows rain down on me. I am in the midst of an assault the likes of which I have never experienced. Sweat and dust sting my eyes. I am now exhausted and my shield arm begins faltering inch by inch with the constant drum of rattan swords and polearms beating across my upturned shield. An enemy column plunges deep within our ranks, revealing an open flank. My blood brother† is at my right; he pushes into my exposed left flank, his shield replacing mine. He absorbs the brunt of a charge from two huge adversaries in full plate armor who tower above us and who wish us a violent end. At this point, the enemy push has forced me down onto one knee. With a rage ranging from frenzied to berserk, my blood brother reveals his flank vulnerably and expels both enemy combatants with killing blows. I promise myself never to forget this moment, when a friend puts his well-being and chance of real bodily harm on the line for my sake.

Lesson: Modern humans will spend incredible sums of resources, including risk of bodily harm, to simulate in-group cooperation and competition with out-groups.

My First Year of Field Work

I am in Uganda, Africa. I have been in the field for months now, observing, following, and studying a community of wild chimpanzees. I have followed them to the periphery of their common home range, and I can sense the group of males I am following and observing closely is agitated and anxious. The hair on the alpha male’s body stands erect—a phenomenon primatologists call piloerection—as a pant hoot “oooowwaa waaaaaaaai waaaaaaaaai” from a rival community echoes across the “no man’s land” between the two different, warring communities. The males closer to me pant hoot, fear defecate, and run back to the safety of their inner community home range.

Lesson: Ways of delineating “us” and “them” are ancient and predate the existence of our species.

My First Depression

In the fall of 2016 I have it all—professional, financial, romantic, and scientific success—yet I am more miserable than I have ever been. Through hard work, grit, and a fair amount of luck, I find myself in a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship that quickly morphs into a multiyear senior research scientist position at Duke University. I work in the lab of Charles Nunn, one of the brightest and most prolific minds in evolutionary anthropology. The work is intellectually challenging and deeply satisfying. We publish innovative, theoretically relevant work at a fantastic rate in respected journals. Durham, North Carolina, equidistant from the coastal beaches and Appalachian Mountains, is a beautiful and charming place to live. Moreover, for the first time in my life, I have financial stability. Despite all this, and having never been prone to bouts of melancholy, I am teetering on the edge of depression. It has been three years since I left Indiana for the pursuit of my career in academia. I left my best friends and my family and now I find myself tribeless and profoundly alone.

Lesson: Being too far removed from our kith and kin increases our vulnerability to a host of mental and physical ailments despite having all other extrinsic needs met.

My First Days Living with African Hunter-Gatherers

I speak with a Hadza elder. The Hadza are a group of indigenous people who have lived here, in north-central Tanzania within the central Rift Valley, for thousands of years. It has been days since I explained in broken field-Swahili the purpose of my research and the camp agreed to collaborate with me. This moment feels significant though, as it is the first time I am alone with the elder. He asks me why I am here. I tell him, “Because there are important lessons that your people can teach me and us Westerners about how to live better lives.” He nods, and ponders my request. He responds: “We live together and depend on each other to survive. It is not always easy, and things between people can become heated, but we know we can rely on each other to survive.”

Lesson: In environments analogous to the kinds our ancestors survived in, hunter-gatherers’ only insurance policy against an ever-changing environment is each other.

My Exposure to the Power of Belonging

It is my first year of university. In the hopes of expanding our social network in this new place, my long-standing high school friend and I have pledged one of the local fraternities. As part of the pledging process, we have been working overtime for the fraternity for weeks. Another friend, an African American I befriended in my dorm, recounts to me a recent experience where he was trying to go to a party at this fraternity and they denied his entrance with a “Your kind aren’t welcome here” denial of entry. When I hear about this, I confront the president of the frat and end up quitting after being dismissed with no meaningful response to the incident. When I compel my friend to leave with me, he, too, dismisses it. This is shocking to me on several fronts, but the one point that has always stuck with me is my high school friend was himself a minority. How could he want to stay?

Lesson: The drive to belong to a group can overshadow our personal identities. Ultimately, we are not born racist, but we are born coalitionist.

My Realization of Ignorance

It is the night of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Donald Trump is winning. I am stunned, as I am realizing, along with a clearly shaken media, that their prognostications of imminent Democratic victory were to be unrealized. The next morning I wake up to find the final results. My mind reels as I contemplate the alternate reality I now live in. My previous certainty and hubris of what I thought I knew about the world crumbles before me. I feel utterly humbled. My models of reality are inaccurate and corrupt, I think to myself. I know in that moment there are forces in the world I do not yet comprehend and they have the power to affect nations.

Lesson: Entire societies can be driven by the power of tribalism.

* * *

WHETHER WE KNOW IT OR not, the Tribe Drive is part of us. In fact, its imperceptibility is part of its power, and it works best when you remain blissfully ignorant of its existence. In the next section, our aim is to derive a deeper understanding of one of science’s greatest investigations: How do we get from something like life’s blueprint—the ATCG(U) nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA—all the way to a behavior?

Reverse Engineering the Drive

The brain is the final conduit, the ultimate pathway, that mediates behavior. And yes, different scientific disciplines will attempt to explain the ever-elusive why behind behavior with their pet “because.” Because of childhood experience; because of this or that hormone; because of some cue in their immediate environment; because of diet during gestation; because they had a bad night’s sleep; because of the culture they were born into; (here is an infamous one) because of their genetics. These are all drives. The result of a drive is a disposition that is realized in the process of certain behaviors. Evolution crafts, for every species, the suite of drives that parameterize the dispositions that give life to our behaviors. If the set of drives is successful, it is passed along and the species thrives. If a set of drives fails, the species may dwindle and go extinct. Fascinatingly, every specialist exploring any aspect of the way drives influence behavior is, more often than not, only a bit right; these drives are all intimately, exquisitely intertwined, and they all contribute to the final thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that ultimately produce the behavior.

The topic of drives carries a few burdens, several of which are stained with ideological dye. Let’s cover them up front so that we can move forward more productively. The first is the common consternation of people who are troubled by any link between genes and behavior. Specifically, the claim that individuals with gene “x” deterministically exhibit behavior “y.” Much of this concern is justified, as many discoveries produced by a plethora of scientific fields have been maliciously distorted, and pseudoscientific jargon has been used to justify atrocious ends; think here of all the bad isms (e.g., racism, sexism, and many more) that have plagued our species. On the opposite side of the spectrum, with exponential computational powers decoding genomic sequences of countless species with ease, splicing genes therapeutically, and outright editing the blueprint of life, we are living in a golden age of molecular discovery. This leads reductionists to lean heavily on genes as the irreducible part to a complex whole that carries ultimate predictive power.

Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, notes the tension between these two extremes of reductionism and antireductionism.2 On the one side, “such pseudoscience has fostered racism and sexism, birthed eugenics and forced sterilizations, allowed scientifically meaningless versions of words like ‘innate’ to justify the neglect of have-nots. And monstrous distortions of genetics have fueled those who lynch, ethnically cleanse, or march children into gas chambers.” And on the other side, “overenthusiasm for genes can reflect a sense that people possess an immutable, distinctive essence … people see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes.” As with most extremes, it is best to hedge bets in the middle.

A gene can drive a behavior and at the same time rarely, if ever, determine it. This fact is profound and it devastates a belief in genetic determinism. Making the claim that genes “decide” is like saying that a dinner recipe decides when to cook a meal. It’s not genes but the environment that decides the when. Importantly, “genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead, they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potential, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise.”3 Perhaps we can distill all these context-dependent factors down to a single concept—dispositions. An immediate environment triggers a vast network of (often competing and mostly unconscious) dispositions.


Copyright © 2023 by David R. Samson