Tribalism, Cooperation, and the Reason We Can’t All Get Along

Maybe story will save us. But this one won’t.

There can’t be good guys without bad guys.

Just like there can’t be a front without a back. In all of our stories, the world is divided, split between good and bad, with the implicit imperative that good must win.

But for the stories to count, to shine a bright beam of winter light into the dark passage of our hearts, it must always seem that good is about to lose. That’s the duality we live in, a way of seeing the world that allows us to participate in the necessary atrocity of consuming other life forms.

It doesn’t seem to bother the lions or the wolves. The empathy of a predator only goes so far, even when they are capable of cooperation. But for us humans, empathy is our superpower. Big brains and nimble hands are undoubtedly useful, but our ability to put ourselves in the place of other lifeforms has made us what we are. And yet it also makes it hard for us to be as savage as the world requires.

And so we are split in ourselves, and it’s no wonder we see the world the way we do. Stories reflect us back at ourselves, and the things we tell ourselves about the world reveal more about us than it. There are two forces at work in every one of us, and those forces act on a large scale anywhere our species exists.

We are torn between the desire to cooperate and the urge to destroy.

Empathy pulls us together. Tribalism tears us apart. And the long story of human history can be seen as a constant battle between those two impulses.

In this poem, Dr John Rose raised an idea I hadn’t heard before. It’s called cooperative eye theory.

Have you ever noticed that the iris, the colored part of the eye, is almost all you can see with most animals? With dogs and cats and even other primates, you only really see the white part of the eye, the sclera, when they look way over to one side.

That’s not true with humans. The whites of our eyes are highly visible, even from a distance. In some people, the edge of the iris can be seen in its entirety, a perfectly round and sunlit island in a blank white ocean. It’s just one more thing that makes our species so goofy looking.

I mean, sure, we find each other attractive. We’re supposed to. But every other animal out there thinks we look ridiculous.

With cooperative eye theory, the idea is that our sclera is visible so that we can see what each other are looking at. When you know where someone’s attention is focused, it’s easier to intuit what they are thinking about. To read their mind, in a way.

A human’s ability to understand the thought process and motivation of other members of its species has no parallel in the natural world. Even if we didn’t have our incredible languages, we would still be uncannily good at understanding one another.

I lived for two years in countries where I barely spoke ten words of the language and managed to function just fine. Goofy looking as we are, our communication abilities can be miraculous.

Those abilities saw us emerge from the dangerous savannahs of Africa to spread across the world. How a bunch of naked apes from the grasslands managed to make mammoths fear them, managed to wipe out the predators that threatened us, is one of the greatest stories in the world. And we like stories.

Just about everything you will do today is a product of this cooperation. The internet you read this on. The house you live in. The road you drive on, and the peace that allows you to live in safety.

The vast majority of us didn’t grow the food that we eat. We didn’t build the houses we live in. Others did, and the constant algaeic bloom of our cities is the byproduct of the ever-increasing complexity of our cooperation.

It all sounds nice, doesn’t it? It’s nice when people get along. Maybe that’s why my wife keeps trying to force a friendship between me and the husbands of her friends. She’s trying to create a tribe we can be part of.

But our impulse for cooperation is matched by something darker. To a greater or lesser degree, we are all individualists, interested first and foremost in our welfare and that of the people who carry our genes. But also, one of the best ways to solidify a tribe and ensure it continues to cooperate is to give it an enemy.

You can see this every day.

Soccer hooligans will embrace complete strangers who happen to be from their town as they support the local team. Whereas that lot in the next town over are the literal scum of the earth. In fact, we tend to hate what’s closest to us. The local derbys, where two teams close to one another play each other, are usually the most vociferous.

And yet, when the national team plays, those divisions suddenly melt away. Now, we are all on the same side, supporting our country against those foreigners who do things differently, and therefore wrong.

Even knowing it’s nonsense doesn’t make you immune. Because it’s fun to be caught up in this kind of group thinking. It’s liberating to lose yourself in the hysteria of belonging.

It’s a joy to abdicate for a while the obligation to think critically and analyze your own motives. Become part of the group, and you can leave all of that behind. What the group says is right, and you no longer have to think for yourself.

I don’t need to explain the dangers of this way of thinking. The twentieth century was one long example of the dangers of collective thinking. Give people an excuse not to think for themselves, and they will gladly take it. Ordinary people become capable of the most outrageous atrocities when they allow themselves to become subsumed by the group.

But every back has its front. Our desire to fit in, our reluctance to question the group we feel we belong to, led to the gas chambers.

But it also led to their liberation.

For Darwin, cooperation represented a problem.

If every organism seeks to pass on its genes, we should all be in competition with one another. Every berry you eat or deer you kill is another one I can’t have. On a basic level, it would be better for me if you weren’t around at all.

But it’s not hard to see the advantages for humans in cooperation. After all, most animals don’t have much to fear from a lone human. The top predators are more than capable of making mincemeat of us when we are on our own.

But a group of humans together is the most formidable thing on the planet. There’s not a creature alive that’s safe from us. And so we are all more likely to survive, and all more likely to pass on our genes, and so the price of cooperation is worth paying.

By watching your back, I make sure my own is protected too. When we work together, we are capable of more than the sum of our individual efforts.

But how do you convince a bunch of bipedal murder apes to work together? To put aside their natural selfishness for the greater good? That’s the ongoing human project. We are a long way from mastering it still.

One of the ways we do it is this. What you’re doing right now.

Story is the hidden driver of human success.

A way to build the empathy our species relies on. A way to teach lessons that reach across space and time.

You and I will never meet. And yet you’re reading these words, hammered out in the sunshine in a valley you may never visit. I get to transmit what I’ve learned to you, and you get to do the same, and soon, we become a kind of hive mind where every individual has a share in the total knowledge of the group.

I’m not an educated man. And yet I know more about the inner workings of the world than the greatest minds of the Renaissance. Because of the stories we tell each other.

That’s why this is more than a hobby, more than mere entertainment or an idle distraction from the more pressing problems of life. Like cooperation, story is who we are. It’s how our ancestors reprogrammed their brains to make the world we live in now. It’s how we understand each other without needing to meet face-to-face, without having to see the whites of each other’s eyes.

It’s sacred, in its way. And the sacred, too, is one more aspect of human cooperation. When we believe in the same things, we work toward the same goals and put aside the selfishness that seems to make more sense.

Cooperation and tribalism are two halves of the same coin.

Our instinctive knee-jerk distrust of groups other than our own solidifies the group that we are in. For thousands of years, that’s been enough.

But we are starting to outgrow these old ideas. From nomadic tribes, we moved to villages to city-states to nations. And now even vast countries aren’t big enough. As our power grows, our understanding needs to grow with it.

Now that we are capable of destroying our own world, the only in-group that will work for us is species-wide. The only team to root for is one that encompasses every one of us.

We haven’t managed that yet. But there’s no reason to think it’s impossible. Our brains are only designed to care about a maximum of 150 people. Still, we’ve managed to use the interconnecting networks of those groups to form nations of millions and even billions.

We know exactly how to do it. We can forge a new identity through the stories we tell each other.

I won’t be the person that tells those stories. Even though I understand the importance of groups, I tend to avoid them. I’m not a joiner. But the stories exist that can make us expand our groups to include the whole planet.

At least, I hope so.