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Ritual Combat, Actual War pt. 2
When one of the contending parties in prestate warfare was routed, the subsequent rampage by the victors through the losers’ territory often claimed the lives of many women and children as well as men. One Maring clan of 600 people in New Guinea lost 2 percent of its population in the rout that followed its loss of 3 percent of its people in the preceding battle. This total may not seem very severe, but to produce equivalent figures France (with a population of 42 million) would have had to lose over 1.2 million soldiers in its 1940 defeat and some 840,000 civilians in the immediate aftermath (or five times the total number of war-related French deaths during the whole war). Victorious Tahitian warriors killed so many people in the loser’s territory that an “intolerable stench” of decaying corpses “pervaded defeated districts for long periods after battle.” Similarly severe slaughters attended battlefield defeats among the chiefdoms of Fiji and Cauca Valley of Colombia. These examples illustrate the most important and universal rule of war: do not lose.
In several ethnographic cases, formal battles with controlled casualties were restricted to fighting within a tribe or linguistic group. When the adversary was truly “foreign,” warfare was more relentless, ruthless, and uncontrolled. Thus the rules of war applied to only certain “related” adversaries, but unrestricted warfare, without rules and aimed at annihilation, was practiced against outsiders.
What I wanted to point out yesterday is that rational debate, dialogue, an “honest exchange of ideas,” whatever you want to call it, is generally analogous to other forms of ritualized competition or combat insofar as it requires a mutual commitment to fair play, to rule adherence, etc. This mutual commitment is a without which not. In the absence of that commitment , there is nothing there can be properly called a debate at all but only the rhetorical equivalent of a shiv fight in a prison yard—something unstructured, frenetic, usually one-sided.
This is true all of the time in all arenas of human discourse, even those typically understood to be above such arbitrary strictures, like those vaunted “hard sciences” they write about in Cell or Reviews of Modern Physics. There is no such thing as a self-evident truth, no such thing as data that commands absolute agreement. The methods of the sciences or mathematics or analytic philosophy are robust and useful in many instances. They’ve produced remarkable triumphs of human achievement. But the method of making someone else assent to a worldview that they have no interest in submitting to, by sheer force of logical argumentation… well, it hasn’t been invented yet.
That’s all I wanted to point out. Rational debate is not a way to conquer outsiders but to compete with fellow insiders.
It’s possible, however, that in trying to analogize all this to the boxing/mugging disparity and then in applying that model to disputes between rightists and progressives, I slandered our progressive friends unduly. I made it seem like they’re a nothing but a cohort of petty criminals, thugs, and skullduggerers, creeping around the shadows of our fair city and violating our laws.
As far as that characterization goes, well, what can I say? Probably not too far off the mark. There are no wretched hives of scum and villainy quite comparable to contemporary movement progressives. They comprise a modern Gomorrah. Apologists of cartel cultures and violent criminality, worshippers of sexual degeneracy, infanticide, sterility, haters of their forefathers, blasphemers, scoffers at God, turncoats against their own flags, states, countrymen. Masters of passive aggression and propaganda. Hardly an honorable man among them. So, no, I can’t say I respect them overmuch, notable exceptions notwithstanding. But I will say this. I will say that the model of citizen vs. criminal is a limited one in very important ways.
How that model fails is by replicating the same sort of misunderstanding I wanted to call into question in the first place. It suggests a meaningful similarity where there isn’t one. It suggests that the two sides, rightist and leftist, are actually both operating under the same system, same regime, same worldview, that the significant difference between them is that one obeys the regime and the other doesn’t. Which is a mischaracterization.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of ideological conflict breaks down along tribal lines. You can use your preferred terms here. There have been excellent analyses of the social rifts, fissures, and Balkanizations of modern America from many quarters. Call them castes, call them thedes, call them tribes, call them races, subspecies, breeding populations. Call them with Murray classes that have stratified to the point that they diverge culturally. Go back in time a little and call them with Hans Kurath the trans-generational effects of American settlement patterns. Call them Yankees, Southerners, Midwesterners, Mexifornians, Pacific Northwesterners. Whatever you choose to call them, you’re recognizing that America doesn’t consist of some three hundred twenty million undifferentiated “citizens” participating in the ins and outs of democracy. Would that it did. But it doesn’t, and we’re not. We’re a loose confederacy of often bitterly opposed people groups, incommensurable interests, zero-sum gamers on opposite sides of the table—all centrally administered by a constellation of elites in politics, finance, and the media that represent yet another group entirely. These are the facts, as unpleasant as they are.
And so it’s not really a fair condemnation of the LGBTers, the multiculturalists, the feminists, the academics, the banksters, the politicians, the figureheads of public discourse to point out that they don’t play by the rules that conservatives, traditionalist, reactionaries, et. al. would agree to. Of course they don’t. Most of the time they belong to different tribes in the first place, with different customs, habits of mind, articles of faith, modes of social organization. Their interest is with their own tribe, not with adhering to the ritual niceties of another. The model that obtains here isn’t law-abider vs. criminal. It’s law-abider vs. law-abider. They simply abide by the laws of their respective kinds.
And this explains the frequent ruthlessness of our ideological conflicts. Inter-tribal conflict is always more serious than intra-tribal conflict, more violent. The enemy is more foreign. The stakes are higher. The costs of losing out in an intra-tribal dispute can be as low as loss of status or face, whereas the costs of losing out in an inter-tribal dispute can be as high as total dispossession, being scattered to the four winds, extinction. This is why, as the introductory selection from War Before Civilization pointed out, intra-tribal conflict often has ritualized, almost ludic elements while inter-tribal conflict escalates to the condition of total war, swallowing up game, player, all.
In other words, don’t expect the minorities to ever decide that whites have learned their lesson. Don’t expect newly liberated homosexuals to live and let live. Don’t expect transnational corporations to respect the rule of law. Don’t expect fair play. That’s absurd. These conflicts aren’t play but war. They’re different tribes contending over territory, resources, ascendency, a foothold for their next generation. When one routs another, there will be no shaking of hands in the middle of the field. There will be claiming of scalps, slaughter, rampage. There will be ousts, purges, the criminalization of dissenting opinions.
The lesson here rhetorically is that you should not put any faith in a free and open exchange of ideas with liberalism at large. And it’s not actually liberalism’s fault if you do so and are frustrated time and again. You misunderstood the nature of the exchange. Not them. The lesson is to stop playing “gotcha,” stop attempting by repetition or by bibliography or by shouting at the top of your lungs to force a recognition of your facts, stop appealing to principles of rational disagreement. Stop pointing fingers and crying foul. Instead, the winning play is to step away from the table entirely. It’s to sit down with your own people instead, to articulate your own positions independent of alien frames. The winning play is to rally your own tribe for action.
This lesson replicates in the political sphere as well, of course. Critique is not fundamentally misguided. It has its purposes and its rewards. But it has limitations as well. No tribe survived the crucible of prehistory by complaining loudly when another tribe violated its territory. Or by appealing to notions of fairness and reciprocity. If they survived at all it was by forward momentum, by winning an arm’s race, by raising up the next generation of fighters, by protecting its borders, and by, when necessary, escalating to a war of annihilation against those who had made their status as enemies clear. Many of our tribes have been on the back foot for quite a while now, playing defense. But all we’ve been accomplishing is a more gradual loss. The only way out is through for us. The only way to win is on offense. We’re no longer contending by means of spears, knives, stone arrowheads, of course. But the dynamics of inter-tribal conflict are still the same. Behave accordingly.