Tag Archives: conflict

Cultural Nostalgia

Sometimes I read an essay or an op-ed that hits me–a sentence or paragraph or analysis that seems so on-target that I feel impelled to share it. That was my reaction to a recent op-ed by Fareed Zakaria (always one of my favorites) in the Washington Post.

Zakaria began by noting that partisanship has become the lens through which Americans interpret reality.  Although a majority of voters still say the economy is their top concern, for example, they interpret the state of the economy through that partisan lens. “When their party is in power, they think the economy is strong; when the other side takes over, that same economy suddenly looks dire. In effect, politics now shapes people’s sense of economic reality, not the other way around.”

And as Zakaria notes, people have chosen their political tribe guided by “two markers the left has long struggled to navigate: culture and class.”

Those two markers aren’t unique to the U.S.–they are global. Social changes wrought by globalization, the increasingly digital nature of our environment, immigration, and the emergence of new gender and identity norms have engendered a cultural backlash.

Over the past 40 years, billions entered the world market, millions crossed borders, the internet collapsed distance and hierarchy, and women and minorities claimed long-denied rights. Scholars celebrate this as progress, integration, emancipation. Yet to many, it feels like dislocation — a dissolving of familiar identities and moral coordinates. A 2023 Ipsos Global Trends survey showed that in many advanced democracies, large majorities think the world is changing too fast, including 75 percent in Germany and nearly 90 percent in South Korea. In the United States, a 2023 Gallup poll showed that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation’s moral values are getting worse. These numbers cut across income and region; they reflect not poverty but that much of America feels culturally adrift.

Hence the paradox: Populism thrives in countries that are, by virtually every measure, richer, safer and freer than at any point in history. Its fuel is not deprivation but disorientation. The right has learned to weaponize that unease, offering a story that is emotionally coherent even when factually thin. It promises a return to the world many people remember — a society of stable hierarchies, recognizable roles and shared norms — if only the global elites are cast down. It is, in essence, the politics of nostalgia.

Zakaria points out that this isn’t new. A similar “cultural nostalgia” erupted in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when figures like Benjamin Disraeli and Otto von Bismarck appealed to the working class through “nationalism, religion and pride, pairing social reform with cultural conservatism.” Our contemporary populists are following the same formula.

There is, Zakaria tells us, one difference: what constitutes class in today’s societies. Today’s divide is no longer between capitalists and workers; it’s between people who flourish in a credential-driven economy and those who don’t.

The commanding heights of business, media and government have converged into a single, credentialed class. In principle, it is open to all; in practice, it has become self-replicating…. And the party that once spoke for the working class is now seen — fairly or not — as the party of the professional elite: urban, secular and fluent in the idioms of globalization.

The reactionary Right has exploited that cultural resentment. Trump’s cabinets– packed with billionaires– have been “ferociously anti-elitist.”

His enemy is not the hedge-funder but the Harvard professor, not the CEO but the columnist. “The professors are the enemy,” Richard M. Nixon once quipped, and JD Vance has repeated the line. Trump turned it into strategy, waging war on America’s cultural institutions — universities, the press, the federal bureaucracy — and convincing millions that the real ruling class was not the wealthy but the educated…

That divide isn’t imaginary.

Among White voters without a college degree, Republicans now win by more than 25 points. Democrats typically win nationally by around 16 points among college graduates. The urban-rural divide is at heart a class divide that has become a political one as well.

There are ways, Zakaria insists, to bridge these gaps. We can build a more democratic meritocracy, one more open and welcoming. And Democrats can “embrace the party’s best instincts — compassion, inclusion, reform — with a tone of respect for those uneasy about rapid change.” Progressives can show their patriotism. Liberals can speak the “language of tradition.”

Right-wing populism is not destiny; it is nostalgia. Liberalism has been counted out many times before, only to prove itself remarkably resilient — because, in the end, it addresses the most powerful yearning of human beings: for betterment, progress and freedom.

Nostalgia, after all, isn’t progress. It’s a dead end.

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I Sure Hope This Is Correct..

Most of us have participated at some point in the (largely unanswerable) debate about “nature versus nurture.” Are humans hard-wired to do thus-and-so, or have we been socialized into a culture that expects/rewards it? I recently came across an article addressing a related issue: is our evident tribalism, our “us versus them” default, genetic? Or is it attributable to culture?

Here’s the lede

More than 200 million people were killed in the 20th century due to war and acts of genocide. Many of these conflicts were rooted in ethnic, national, religious, political, or other forms of identity-group conflict. The 21st century is already filled with similar horrors. For many scholars and much of the public, this pattern of between-group conflict emerges directly from humanity’s deep, evolved sense of “us” vs. “them.” To state it simply, human nature is “tribal.” It’s how we built cities, nations, empires. It’s also how each one of those things has crumbled.

But this is not true. Human intergroup conflicts and how they relate to human nature are neither about being “tribal” nor about some evolved, fixed hostility between “us” and “them.”

The argument isn’t that humans don’t create divisions/antagonisms with those they encounter; clearly, “we have the capacity to classify and develop mental shortcuts to use classifications once we have created (or learned) them”. The point is, however, that categories like “us” and “them” are flexible. They need not set up what the author calls “a conflictual relationship.” Neurobiologists have determined that the biological bases of that classification process aren’t “hard-wired.”

Rather, our neurobiology reflects a highly flexible system that can represent the self and others. Additionally, how “us” and “them” are divided can shift quickly and dynamically. This is a very different reality from the assumption of a natural, inherent “us vs. them” mentality.

Scientists have also found that humans have the capacity to have “harmonious interdependent relationships that cross group boundaries.” (Sociologists call those relationships “bridging social capital.”)

Decades of study of intergroup dynamics in primate societies, human foraging groups, and small scale societies reveals that natural selection has shaped a greater reliance on tolerant between-community relationships in humans than in any other primate species (or possibly any other mammalian species).

Even the argument that the “us vs. them” mode of existence came into being with the evolutionarily recent advent of agriculture, cities, states, and nations is not correct. Humans are neither Hobbesian beasts nor Rousseauian egalitarians; we are a species that is characterized by between-group relations that are complex and dynamic, good and bad. There is no doubt that between-group conflict had a role in our evolution. But the fossil and archaeological evidence casts substantial doubt on whether such conflict was prevalent at the level and pervasiveness to support an “us vs. them” human nature argument.

The author takes offense at the use of the term “tribalism” as a shorthand for the “us versus them” thesis–a use to which I plead guilty. He points out that the term “tribe”  identifies a societal structure that is “older,” more “primitive,” and less civilized than European forms of society, and argues that the term thus carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. I’m not sure I agree with that characterization, but I do see his point.

But that does not mean humans are naturally peaceful or always getting along. No other species creates cash economies and political institutions, changes planet-wide ecosystems in a few generations, builds cities and airplanes, arrests and deports its members, drives thousands of other species toward extinction, and intentionally hates and decimates other groups of humans. But why all this is the case is not a simple “us vs. them” story.

The author argues that invoking the notion of “tribalism” for the world’s problems is misleading–it suggests that our conflicts are pre-ordained by our hard-wiring, when the various ways in which we “slice and dice” our fellow humans is far more malleable. We are not biologically-impelled to fight those who are dissimilar, and we are capable of defining and redefining those dissimilarities in a multitude of ways.

Today, conflict between groups, peoples, and identity clusters are entangled with extreme economic inequality and the ongoing violence of nationalism, religious conflict, racism, and sexism — all complex realities with histories, dynamic social processes, and multiple, often different, factors shaping outcomes. There is no simple “natural” explanation for the messes we create.

Ultimately, it’s the culture that determines whether we prize co-operation or conflict.

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