On tribalism and the march toward a more perfect union

As a salad-green undergraduate at a left-leaning East Coast public university, I first heard “the personal is political” in an indie film-making class. It scared the bejeepers out of me.

I wanted to keep my head down, do my work, get on with things. Also, I didn’t really know what the phrase meant.

But it’s a phoenix phrase. Its significance and application rise anew with each public concern. And public concerns have always arisen from personal discomfort.

When we can’t do something all by ourselves, we look outside of ourselves. For solidarity. For affirmation. For the comfort of tribalism.

Tribalism — a maligned word — isn’t all bad until it is. But the vaunted rugged individualism that President Herbert Hoover spoke about in 1928? That was problematic from the get-go. It did nothing to stem the ravages of the Great Depression. That took a new administration and new social programs.

Rugged individualism leads to a kind of self-delusion that we are not dependent on one another. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s a shame, really, that many people know the famous words from the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” but don’t read far enough to encounter the wise challenge found a few lines later:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long

established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that [hu]mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Or, to paraphrase inelegantly, personal discipline in the face of social ills can be tolerable—until it is not.

Theologian Brad East, writing in The Point, says, “Try as we might, we will not have a racially just society that remains full of racist people, or a peaceable society full of violent people, or an environmentally healthy society full of people who litter, pollute and daily despoil the Earth. We must be a certain kind of people to attain certain kinds of virtue, including justice. We cannot have one without the other.”

This raises the obvious question: How to create a society full of radically less racist/homophobic/misogynistic people? How to create a society of less violent people? How to create a society in which fewer people (and, chiefly, corporations) do not daily despoil the Earth?

Isn’t this the question our youth ask after we teach them about the environment — not to litter, to recycle, to grow little plants because plants and trees give us oxygen and cleanse the environment? These same little people (I was one of them a long time ago) grow up and see that there is not nearly enough public education and public resources put into stemming the destruction of our environment. The odd highway cleanup, the recycled jars and cans sometimes seem like tokenism — a way to placate the collective guilty unconscious without having to really advocate for sweeping social change.

But the personal is the political, is it not? Those whose political views I find largely abhorrent are not afraid to trumpet and organize their personal preference for the right to bear personal weapons in all manner of situations even as death from gun violence is at its highest in 20 years.

Those who disagree with a woman’s personal right to reproductive choice — with whom I strongly disagree — are not afraid to organize and trumpet the need for government to restrict and punish choice.

Organizing is a good, old-fashioned and time-honored way of making sure that the personal is political and therefore must be — at least eventually — handled in the public realm. So the uptick in activism, education and consciousness-raising around socially divisive issues is a not a harbinger of greater divisiveness. It is the weal and privilege of the commonwealth we share to speak up when “evils are insufferable.”