“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered in March of 1861 as the United States was disintegrating into civil war, asked Americans to see themselves as one people who could — and should — abide each other’s differences and keep the experiment of self-government alive. The alternative, he argued, was that the right of secession, once established, would have no theoretical end, as minority political groups could forever keep disbanding from the Confederacy or the Union until only anarchy or despotism remained. Can’t we, he asked, pause a bit to recognize that our common bonds are greater and more important than our disagreements?
Immeasurable suffering resulted from our inability to respond affirmatively to that call.
So it is today that we still struggle to rise above tribal tendencies. The conversation continues and the question posed by Lincoln remains: can we choose to see each other as friends rather than enemies? Can we, in the age of fake news and alternative facts, summon somehow our “better angels,” be our better selves?
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Lincoln, like Shakespeare, had deep insight into human character, long before modern brain research and psychological studies would confirm his insights. Having suffered from depression throughout his adult life, he had thought more deeply about life’s ultimate questions than most politicians before or since. In the phrase “better angels of our nature,” he was speaking with the understanding of one who had been close to suicide but would ultimately overcome his illness and rededicate his life to purposes larger than himself. His phrase contemplated that there is, as retired biologist E.O.Wilson has detailed, a fundamental duality in humanity, and that we are called upon, individually and collectively, to grapple with choices over how to live.
As Wilson describes wonderfully in The Social Conquest of Earth, humans possess extraordinary capacities of cooperation aimed at higher community or tribal success, but also unrivaled capacity for aggression, domination, even cruelty. This combination of character traits, hard-wired into our DNA, is what has made humans the super-species that has conquered the Earth, and also the super-species that is now capable of destroying our own biosphere and/or each other. As an example, it took extraordinary levels of coordination, collaboration, and teamwork to design and create a nuclear weapon, and it took a an extraordinary capacity for cruelty to use it — twice no less — on large human population centers. The tribalism reflected in warfare is what made that unprecedented killing palatable. Saving tens of thousands of Our side’s lives was worth the cost of hundreds of thousands of Theirs…
Having gone from near extinction at the height of the Ice Age only 60,000 years ago, humans have been so successful that the formula for our success (adaptability, cooperation, aggression) may ultimately, and ironically, cause our undoing.
When riots broke out in L.A. following the acquittal of the police officers accusing in the roadside beating of Rodney King, King went on television to urge calm and famously asked: “Can’t we all get along?” It was a more profound question than perhaps he realized. The jury is still out. As our number is now more than seven billion, getting along is both more imperative and more difficult. Whether we can get along may depend on whether or not we choose to be our better angels.
In the book Moral Tribes, psychologist Jeffrey Greene describes the conundrum well. The evolution of moral codes of conduct requires that humans occasionally favor Us ahead of Me (cooperation, collaboration). We hold up as virtuous that kind of selflessness. That same moral structure, however, can easily be translated into putting Us ahead of Them (tribalism, aggression, competition). We celebrate those actors as well: brave soldiers in battle, great athletes, the victors in capitalism’s many competitions, and so forth.
Interestingly, though, we humans define Us and Them differently from each other, depending on context and on our levels of moral and intellectual growth. So we not only have a tendency to be wary of others and other groups, but also a tendency to make these distinctions in non-uniform ways. We define groups and communities (Us and Them) differently depending on our circumstances and experiences across difference.
When we were small bands of hunter gatherer communities, undoubtedly the Us was the band that traveled, mated, and child-reared together, and the Them was the occasional group encountered along the way. Land was plentiful and population minimal, so conflicts were easier to sidestep.
With the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, however, things got much more complicated. With population increases came cities, property, specialization, monogamy, and formal religions. And of course, politics and wars. The tribal tendencies that had made successful collaborative hunter gatherers now worked to cause humans to put up fences, to defend turf, restrict sexual practices, and to form political alliances.
Today, some might define US as the nuclear family, and the rest of the world as Them, a skeptical and somewhat paranoid way of living. Some define the Us in terms of race or religion, with other races or religions being the Them, a formula for large conflicts (think Jim Crow, systemic racism, walls at borders and Muslim bans). Some business people, like Mitt Romney, separate groups into the “makers” and the “takers,” with clear preference for the former and disdain for the latter. And our current President invokes the language of white nationalism, with the demonization of the Other.
Some define the group in far broader terms, for example, that all Americans are one and must recognize each others’ bonds, the view Lincoln urged in 1861 and was later echoed by Barack Obama. One can, with training, even come to accept all of humanity as Us, even all of life as Us, a higher level of consciousness still, albeit one that not many of us achieve. Those who do achieve it — MLK, Ghandi, Jesus, for example — were controversial precisely because they confronted us with our inability to think more openly towards each other. MLK spoke of agape love, the love of humanity that transcends everything, even the fact that the people you embrace are trying to kill you. Few of us reach that state of agape love, however much we wish we could.
So what Lincoln asked of us — to see ourselves as friends — was not and is not easy. It is the same path, in a sense, that MLK, Ghandi, and Jesus asked us to walk. Find that better self. Recognize the humanity in others outside your comfort zone, your tribe. It is no accident that the higher love they envisioned was so threatening to our lower level tribal consciousness that they all, every one of them, met the same violent end. To challenge tribalism is to risk an early death.
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While it is not easy or popular to reject tribal tendencies, to choose our better angels, it may be that our survival depends on it.
Returning to E.O. Wilson, his most recent book Half Earth argues that the human race can save the biosphere that we have subjugated and polluted if we dedicate ourselves to preserving half the Earth’s surface to biological preservation. This of course would require a level of national and international cooperation never before seen. (You thought sticking with the Paris climate agreement was tricky?) Humanity may be smart and adaptive enough to learn (if slowly) that it doesn’t have a choice. We either preserve our planet or we die. How could we fail to act to preserve it when that choice is made in those terms?
Easy. Just stick with the Us vs. Them tendencies long enough and we won’t be able to get where we need to be in time. History has many examples of cultures and communities failing to heed the warning signs, as Jared Diamond documents in Collapse.
Consider this: We are told that more than one billion people live between 0-5 feet above sea level. What happens if and when those people are displaced by rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms, a day that will surely come? If we see refugees as fellow members of our community in need, we shelter them and bring them in. If we see them as threats to our tribe, we exclude them and let them fend for themselves. Will our better or lesser angels guide our choices?
Similarly, count me among those who have concluded that political parties in the United States, as currently structured, may be causing more tribal harm than good at this point. Every day we are treated to examples of how party loyalty prevails over what is best for the country. In what ways is this good for us, the people? Hypocrisy seems to be the only predictable outcome of our political deliberations these days (with a special prize for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, whose accommodation of the unacceptable speaks volumes). If there were no such thing as political parties, or if we had so many political parties that collaborative alliances were necessary, would our outcomes not be better? If our representatives were just to vote based on what’s best for the American public, as best they could discern, what a relief that would be!
How to get there? It starts, of course, with ourselves. Somehow, despite the diatribes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk urging us in other directions, we have to open our hearts to the rest of the world, even those who reject us and our way of thinking. The First Amendment protects the rights of the lunatic fringe to promote its agendas, but the counter-narratives must grow stronger. Perhaps it starts with all of us turning off the television “news” in recognition that the “news” channels have largely failed the public by morphing into entertainment and ratings businesses.
But there is also, in my humble opinion, a more basic ingredient that is required. We need a more informed citizenry. We cannot accept others as ourselves if we can’t recognize truth from falsehood. We cannot be at our best if we can’t recognize when the peddlers of division are manipulating our understandings of each other. This elevation of Know Nothingism, from the Willie Horton ads, to false portrayals of immigrants, to Sean Hannity’s false conspiracy theories, to the President’s routine departure from the truth all share one common theme: distortion of reality.
We are told that They are coming over our walls and into Our homes, and that We must protect ourselves. We are told that there is carnage in our streets and that we should be afraid. We have renamed law enforcement agencies “Homeland” Security, a throwback to Nazi Germany’s tribal invocation of the “Motherland.” These distortions surround us. They are effective politically but they are toxic to our souls. What if we were better — smarter — at recognizing B.S.? We teach our children at schools what sources are reliable and unreliable for research papers. Couldn’t those same skills be used for discernment in our national conversations? Can we shrug off the rants of the delusional?
We could open our eyes wider to see if these distorting narratives are actually true. We could educate ourselves to recognize better when we are being manipulated. We could recognize, for example, that even in the mundane detail of the proposed federal budget, there are proposed choices, reflecting what we think of each other and who among us we value. We could try to change the narrative to one that recognizes that at some very fundamental level, we really are all in this together and that we thrive or perish as one.
We are told that certain billionaires are building themselves underground bunkers and safe houses in New Zealand and the American West, where, if all hell breaks loose, they can live in comfort and safety. “We take care of our own” seems to be the message, “our own” defined stingily.
There is a smarter way, maybe the only way. We could choose life — life together. Life where our differences are simply part of the fabric of our bonds rather than a reason to separate. Life where we rise or fall together.
Even We Here 