Michael Morris: Tribal

Kelly connects with Michael Morris of Columbia University to talk about his timely book “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.”  

 

It’s kind of amazing that the term “tribal” has become a mostly negative term and this book is about how our tribal orientation is why we actually evolved as a species. 

“Exactly. It’s not rationality or ethics or aesthetics that got us out of the Stone Age – that helped us break away from the rest of the evolutionary pack and become a completely different kind of animal. It’s some aspects of our human nature that many of us overeducated types tend to deride, which is, you know, our ability to conform and mesh with other people. Our quest for status and standing in society and in communities and our nostalgia for the ways of the past. So, this can seem sentimental and backward looking, but that’s what created the cultural memory that allowed people to not have to reinvent the wheel every generation so that you could start having the accumulation of culture across the generations.” 

 

You also discuss the idea that culture is not and has never been static. 

“Cultures are quite malleable. They’re not sort of unchanging and unchangeable, which is sometimes the view that comes from anthropologists or other cultural scholars. You and I are old enough to remember that a few years ago we didn’t use ‘they’ as a pronoun for a single person. But now, if you don’t do it, you’re considered to be obstinate and out of touch, right? So, these conventions evolve not just over the centuries, but over the decades. And it doesn’t evolve in ways that are completely out of our control. It’s usually a concerted effort by an activist group and their allies that brings about things like the use of ‘they’ or in a previous decade, same-sex marriage. And we need to get rid of this myth that cultures are static and unchangeable, and we all need to become a little bit more aware of what the levers are for managing the influence of culture and remolding cultures that need that need to be adjusted to fit the current strategy.” 

 

A good example of cultural malleability is the temperance movement, which you note evolved over time in public squares with preachers and female societies pledging oaths of sobriety.  

“What’s really interesting about prohibition is that the repeal movement happened even more quickly and dramatically than the Prohibition Movement. A few years after Prohibition was passed, some newspapers in New York began doing reader polls and they had dazzled people by being able to predict which president was going to win, which was a novelty at the time. Gallup polls didn’t exist yet. There was a stereotype that women were more in favor of prohibition than men and so they decided to test it. They found that, in fact, women and men were against prohibition. It was a startling revelation to people, because it had just become an assumed truth that most people were dry. And this reopened dialogue about something that had been sealed and settled. Then they repeated the survey every couple of years, and the percentage of majority who were against prohibition was increasing and increasing. And after about 5 years of growing recognition that most people were against prohibition, it was put up to a vote again, and they repealed the amendment so that we could sell alcohol once again.”