Parlous times, but don’t retreat

Peter Matheson reflects on globalisation, tribalism and fundamentalism.

We humans  are inherently  tribal.

In the 1970s  a hippy-looking friend of mine wandered through remote Turkish villages, prowling around for archaeological remains, and was most disconcerted when the old women spat at him in disgust. He had arrived from another planet, as far as they were concerned, an unwelcome intrusion. Similarly:  "Them, they’re just animals", people in Glasgow used to say about those living on the other side of the river Clyde.

A sort of instinctive tribalism, this, which we can giggle at today. It becomes tragic, though, when it escalates into the unspeakable violence  we’ve seen between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda, to  give  but  one example.In today’s developed countries, however, a new and highly conscious tribalism is emerging, a very different animal. It is not  dissimilar  to  the volkisch  movement in the  Third  Reich.  

Those who should know better put on blinkers. President Donald Trump is no exception.  Our neighbours in Australia are earning world-wide revulsion for their treatment of the boat people. Little Englanders are turning their back on the EU, lapping up lies they know full well to be lies. Poland and Hungary have slammed down the shutters on desperate refugees. Catholic Poland, for goodness sake, which has itself suffered so much! The United States now marches under the slogan:  "America First". 

In Europe, virulent populist movements thrive. And in December, the assistant general secretary of the World Council of Churches, no less, an African theologian called Isabel Phiri, was singled out from a delegation and denied entry to Israel.

So what’s driving this intolerance? 

The medieval landscape was dotted with innumerable strongholds, castles, fortresses and gaunt "Keep Out" signs to all and sundry. We thought we’d got beyond that. 

Two  world wars had spurred efforts to think across the old barriers, to develop in the League of Nations, then the United Nations,  not to mention the EU, institutions which brought us together. New Zealand itself has developed  a reputation as an honest broker in resolving conflicts. Is all this now to be lost? 

It was never perfect, of course, as Alastair Hulbert’s, A Dream Half-Understood, pointed out in respect to Europe,  and as the calamity of Srebenica  underlined. But we seemed to be moving in the right direction.  No more, alas. No more.

Vast geo-political, economic, cultural upheavals are  shaking  us to the core. We are beginning to grasp what global warming will entail in  social disruption. Globalisation has provoked retaliatory isolationism.  We are  witnessing new levels of barbaric assaults on the innocent. Nothing is sacred any more, not  mosques, churches, hospitals or little children.

Terrorism and state-sponsored repression rival one another in inhumanity. As refugees pour across  borders we are reminded of the convulsive mass migrations of the late Roman Empire. 

One reaction is to go into intellectual and moral hibernation. Atavistic symptoms abound, religious fundamentalism being probably the most obvious one, but Barack Obama has pointed to the dangers inherent in personal media genres. Increasingly we inhabit communicative silos. Recently we hosted  two pleasant young guests who  spent four days with us glued to their  iPhones. We knew as little about them when they left as when they arrived. 

If Levinas is right that ethics begins and ends by engaging with "the face of the other", then we are not in a good way.

My own  tradition is religious.  (Religious, not some vague individual spirituality.) Church membership meant that your money and energy, or some of it, leaked into the rest of society. Prayer, personal and communal, disciplined you to think beyond yourself; if you were regularly petitioning on behalf of the vulnerable, and lamenting the  absence of peace or social justice, you had to do something about it. The Jim Andertons were reared in that sort of expectation. 

Tribalism was definitely not on. We can’t go back to yesterday’s  lost religious world. My hunch, though, is that we need to find new clusters of belonging  and believing  if  our current moral and intellectual hibernation is to be overcome.

The US poet Christian Wiman has an interesting take on this:  "There is some combination of austerity and clarity that I think we, as a whole culture, are grasping toward. And the main movement of the culture is against it, all the political language; all that is just rot. But I do think there’s this huge cultural grasping toward something that won’t be so froufrou and slip out of our grasp and just make us think it’s ridiculous, and yet, also, something that is open enough to engage those parts of us  we don’t understand."

We live in parlous times, for sure, but the answer is not to shut down our perceptions and retreat into a cave and hibernate. More attractive options are available.

- Peter Matheson is a Dunedin historian and theologian.