How Did We Get Here? Tribal Identity and Accepting President Barack Obama

Reader Contribution by Staff
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Until fairly recently, the people we depended on lived nearby. Most human beings never traveled more than a few miles from their home. We lived and died in the same small group of people, typically, with one set of traditions and one language.

Among aboriginal societies it’s very common for the name of a tribe to be the equivalent of “the human beings” or “the people” in that tribe’s language. Out of almost 100 tribes listed on the native-languages.org website,[1] more than 30 define the name of their tribe in more or less that way — “the people,” “the original people,” “the best people,” (the “best people,” the Illiniwek from which the state of Illinois takes its name, now call themselves the Peoria, which means “backpack people”), or “the true people.”

Until recently we could afford the luxury of seeing our personal tribes as God’s chosen people. The Judeo-Christian Bible is, of course, full of these declarations. We consistently and systematically considered our local, tribal interests superior to the needs and interests of other people who spoke a different language and wore a different style of footwear.

To a surprising degree, our modern wars have been tribal wars. The Nazi movement, which catalyzed World War II, was explicitly a tribal movement designed to distinguish the Aryan race from other Europeans. Predictably, the people trying to distinguish themselves defined the “Aryans” as the original speakers of Indo-European languages and therefore, in their opinion, the “original people” of Europe.[2] The First World War’s proximate cause was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, monarch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student inspired by the annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarians. A lot of Serbs lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time. Princip evidently believed he was defending his ethnic heritage. The ethnic divisions of the Balkan States, including Bosnia Herzegovina, are cultural fault lines along which violence has often erupted. Like World War II, the First World War germinated in a tribal mindset.

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