3.1 Heartbroken rebels
What’s the cure for our divisive and bloody tribal nature?
The Golden Rule says…
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Seems like that should work. It should be enough. Imagine if everyone followed this imperative how sweet the world would be.
Except there’s a problem, because…
This Rule is tribal.
It comes down to us from times when the Rule did not extend beyond the tribe. The people of the Bible were a very tribal people, so they didn’t need to have this detail spelled out for them.
In the context of the Bible, the Rule reads…
Do unto others (within your tribe) as you would have them do unto you.
Other exhortations are similar in terms of what’s understood but not stated. For example…
Love your neighbor (within your tribe) as yourself.
Or…
Thou shalt not kill (within your tribe.)
I call this the tribal parenthesis.
The purpose of the Golden Rule was to keep peace within the tribe and strengthen internal cooperation so the tribe would be better prepared to handle external threats. It wasn’t designed to make peace throughout the world.
When he was running for president, George W. Bush bragged that he was a born–again Christian. So when he took our country into the Iraq War, protestors slammed him with comments like this…
You claim to be a Christian, so you should follow the fifth commandment which states unequivocally, “Thou shalt not kill.” But troops under your command are killing hundreds of thousands of people, including women, children, and old people. How can you justify that in light of your professed faith? You’re such a hypocrite!
Bush was dumbfounded by that charge. He did not see himself as a hypocrite—and he was right. He had a much better understanding of the Bible than the protestors did, because…
In the tribal context, killing your enemy is perfectly moral.
And that means the Golden Rule has an evil twin, the Bloody Rule, which says…
You must kill outsiders whenever necessary to protect your own.
I remember a Sunday morning in church when I was a teenager. Bored with the sermon, I started looking around at the congregation and fell into a reverie:
Oh, I see how this works. Our sins are not sins. We’re Presbyterians so we’re God’s favorites. If we make a mistake and do wrong, we’re forgiven, because we’re members of this church, the right church. Methodists and Lutherans are pretty close to us, so maybe they can be forgiven sometimes.
But Catholics, well, they’re so different from us what with crossing themselves and their stinky incense and their cannibalistic communion, how can their misdeeds ever be forgiven?
And Jews, they’re so far beyond different that we don’t need to think about them at all.
I had never heard anyone in my church say such things out loud, but tribal antagonism was clearly present under the surface.
The Golden Rule of the Bible was forged with tribal lead, so it does not oppose tribalism. Instead it belongs to tribalism and sustains it. So it’s evolution’s rule.
Jesus was broadly inclusive, but still he had a boundary, and anyone on the other side of the line he drew, he condemned. For example, in Mark 16:16 he said…
“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
And if that’s not scary enough, he made the fate of those outside his tribe more explicit in Matthew 13:49–50, where he said…
“So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
There’s not a single passage in the New Testament that says if you put love at the center of your life, if you’re committed to compassion and the welfare of others, if you perform good deeds diligently and daily, you will be saved even if you don’t become a confessed believer in Christ.
The Gospel makes clear that it’s not enough to live by love…
You have to be a sworn member of Christ’s tribe.
And in our time, the fundamentalists who claim to be the only true Christians, are using Christianity as a label for their tribal identity rather than as a commitment to a loving way of life.
So someone who actually lives Christ’s message of compassion, but does not swear loyalty to Christ is condemned, while someone who does evil, as long as he has taken the oath of fealty, will be saved.
Although Jesus was basically a tribal guy, he was not just that. He was complicated and contradictory. A lawyer challenges Jesus with the question, “And who is my neighbor?” And Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.”
That certain man was a Jew. That was assumed. He didn’t need to be specifically identified.
And the story continues: This man fell among thieves who stripped him and robbed him and wounded him.
A priest came along the road and passed him by. A Jewish priest. A Levite came along the road and passed him by. A Jew.
But then along comes a Samaritan. He stops to give aid. This is actually remarkable because, he and the wounded man were on opposite sides of a serious tribal boundary. The Jews and Samaritans were at odds with each other. They were adversaries.
Samaritans, being a different people, were reviled by the Jews of that time. They were not considered neighbors in the sense of being included under the umbrella of tribal protection.
But this Samaritan took pity and helped, and helped with great care and generosity.
So Jesus in that moment wasn’t telling a cute story extolling a random act of kindness. He was taking a radical trans–tribal stand. I wish I could have been there to see the reactions of his listeners, a tribal people. How shocked were they to hear him say they should extend their love and care to people from other tribes? How hard was it for them to accept this teaching?
How hard is it still today? In our common parlance, the phrase “Good Samaritan” has come to mean someone who helps a stranger. It’s lost the original meaning of coming to the aid of someone who by virtue of being on the other side of a tribal divide is your adversary or potential adversary. Which means…
This story has lost its soul.
Of all the stories in the tribal Bible, this is the one that’s most different, and most subversive. And the one we’d most need to follow if we were really serious about saving ourselves as a species.
Sometimes I like to imagine that the real Jesus, in his heart of hearts, was trans–tribal, and that none of those verses where he damns people were really his own but were slipped in later on by his chroniclers who were not as enlightened as he was and therefore dragged his gospel back into the tribal mud.
Or if it was true that, having grown up in a tribal culture, Jesus did condemn nonbelievers and meant it, then I would hope that as he grew older, had he not been crucified, he would have become more and more trans–tribal, maturing his gospel until it became one of pure nurturance transcending boundaries.
The story of the Good Samaritan makes me look again at the Golden Rule, and what I see now is how so very many people want that Rule to be trans–tribal. They want it to mean: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…
Including everyone.
And this got me thinking about myself as a child. My parents and my church shut me down so I would fit into their way of life. But…
I didn’t want to be shut down.
I figured out how to make it easier on my parents, by shutting myself down on my own, colluding, being a good boy in that way. I was giving them a gift. The more I did on my own the less they had to do.
But something in me hated that I was hurting myself like that. And though my behavior was submissive, my spirit had a spark of fight in it, buried out of sight but still there.
When I look back, I can see that I paid a price for belonging to the tribe I was born into, my church tribe. And it was a big price. In fact…
Too big a price.
But…
I had to pay it.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to fit into my family and the church, because I was utterly dependent on them for survival. But there was this fighting impulse in me that refused to make peace with what was demanded of me.
And that meant I was…
A rebel.
And I wanted to love the adults in my life, I really wanted that. But they were hurting me, and this….
Broke my heart.
And that meant as a child I was…
A heartbroken rebel.
Though both the heartbreak and the rebellion were hidden from sight.
As an old man, I’m still heartbroken and still a rebel. But now both of these elements are visible.
And I wonder, how many of our ancestors back through the millennia had trouble in childhood with paying the cost of fitting in? How many as adults had trouble with the demands of tribal fundamentalism? How many questioned the status quo? At least silently to themselves. How many longed for things to be different?
How many, like me, were heartbroken rebels?
Even if they never said anything about this out loud.
How many rankled at the price they had to pay for survival, even while understanding that they had to pay that price?
Of course, they weren’t about to overturn their tribal way of life. That would have been foolish and self–defeating, because their survival depended on sticking with the tribal discipline.
Our ancestors spent their whole lives in the company of pretty much the same small number of people, and these people were the source of most of their happiness. And tribal fundamentalism insists that tribemates are first and foremost…
Survival partners.
That was the foundational social contract.
But I wonder how often people came…
To love some of their tribemates, not only for their usefulness, but for themselves.
I wonder how often people wished they could…
Put personal love ahead of tribal demands.
And I wonder how many of them wished they didn’t have to diminish themselves in any way at all in order to fit in. How many wished they could be more self-expressive? And how many had moments when …
They wished their lives could be self-determined instead of socially-determined?
Evolution gave our ancestors social cooperation as a tool to enhance competition in the life–and–death struggle of tribe against tribe. But as people developed their skill with this tool, as they got to know it intimately, while they depended on the survival advantage it gave them, I wonder how many of them…
Fell in love with cooperation just for itself.
And wanted to make it their home, without the tribalism.
I wonder how many…
Wished they could dissolve tribal boundaries?
How many wished they didn’t have to live in a constant state of self–protective vigilance, and in constant fear of what their neighbors might try to do to them?
I saw an interview on YouTube with an old tribesman from New Guinea. He talked about his early adult years when hyper–tribalism was rampant throughout the island.
In those days, you lived your life in a relatively few square miles, because the tribal conflicts were so severe that if you wandered out of your tribal territory, you’d be killed. And other tribes might come into your territory and attack you at any time. So you lived in constant fear.
As this man told this story, you could see his face tense and his body become rigid.
Then he was asked about how things are now, and you could see relief sweep over him as he told the interviewer how happy he was to be free of the old ways.
In our hunter–gatherer days, sometimes one tribe would make an alliance with another tribe. I wonder if the pleasure of such an alliance ever provoked…
A longing for universal alliance to replace tribal divisiveness.
I wonder how many of our tribal ancestors asked themselves…
Why can’t we all just get along?
In our modern mass societies, we’re able to make spaces of our own where we can choose our friends from a very large number of possibilities. And where we can make families not by biological determination or social prescription but according to the design of our own personal desires.
We live in a time when it’s possible for us in our own lives to put personal love ahead of tribal allegiance. And in doing this we get to enjoy a kind of life that was not available to our ancestors.
We can choose to say to our children…
You matter more to me than my church or political party or circle of friends or anybody.
It’s not that we have total freedom. But certainly spaces have opened up that were not there before, spaces where tribalism is diluted.
Yet in the big picture, human society still runs on tribal fundamentalism. Look at our politics. It’s becoming so fiercely tribal, and vicious and crazy and dangerous.
We’re living in a time when tribal fundamentalism, so deeply rooted in our genome, is going to be the death of us. And…
This makes survival a moot point.
So…
We don’t owe tribal allegiance our loyalty anymore.
And that being the case…
Why not go all-in for personal love?
To take this stand is…
Evolutionary blasphemy.
But evolution is not taking care of us anymore, so why not do everything we can to create deeply loving relationships? Why not become activists for love? Why not reach out from the close relationships we cherish, to gather more and more people into…
Larger networks of inclusive nurturance.
If you’re someone who wants us humans to be so much better than we are, and you decide to join in the mission to upgrade love, and you really fight for that, then you get to call yourself a rebel.
And if you see how we as a species, with so much potential, are failing, and failing badly, and you see how we’re marching helplessly down the road to extinction, and your heart is breaking because of that, then you get to call yourself…
A heartbroken rebel.
And you get to claim your place in the long lineage of the rebels who have gone before.
