Musing about how the pace of technological change was so outstripping the evolution of human political change that the human race was almost sure to extinguish itself in the next century or two, I crossed the Rhinecliff Bridge early on a bright mid-October morning on my way to the first part of a two-day conference called “Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism” at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.
Bard has been hosting these conferences for 16 years now. With fewer than three weeks to go before the very consequential American presidential election in which tribalism, defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as “a very strong feeling of loyalty to a political or social group, so that you support them whatever they do,” will be on fulsome display. The conference had an urgency that reached beyond political or academic platitude.
As was made clear at the conference, loyalty to one’s group or tribe doesn’t have to be unconditional, but the frequency that it is irreversibly unconditional is worrisome. It’s authoritarianism’s playbook.
At the same time, as Hannah Arendt realized, humans are a tribal species. We crave the sense of solidarity in community that tribalism brings. It is unrealistic to expect us to embrace a cosmopolitanism that excludes tribalism.
I felt slightly less pessimistic as I traversed the most aggressive of the speed bumps of River Road for the fourth time in the two full days of the conference. The first step to finding good answers to complex problems is to pose the right questions, and I thought the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities had done that. And it didn’t embed the “correct” answers in the way the questions were asked, as the Platonic dialogues had done. It was a tribute to the way the event had been organized that the program seemed to me to have encouraged a genuine spirit of inquiry.
The spoken word came before the written word, and thinking before speaking. But not always, as the example of one major presidential candidate endearing himself to his supporters by the frequency of his doing otherwise shows.
There’s unquestionably a virtue in spontaneity of expression. At one point in a verbal exchange on the second afternoon, Arendt conference founder and academic head Roger Berkowitz responded to a position presented by a speaker. “I have to think about it out loud,” he said. Thinking out loud expresses a flexibility and openness to the views of others – an antidote to unyielding conflict.
Speaker Uday Mehta, a well-traveled academic and student of liberal thought, complimented Berkowitz’s annual event, calling it “the most important intellectual conference of the year, always with a theme, never with an agenda.”
How does he do it?
Risking the perils inherent in generalizing from a single instance, I saw four roles through which Berkowitz produced his events:
To enrich his chosen theme, he must have had the capacity to draw from a wide palette of humankind. So Berkowitz has first had to develop a relationship of trust with a lot of different kinds of people. Without that key role, the raw material for a successful conference would not have been available.
Friday noon’s session entitled Bloods, Crips, and Overcoming Tribalism on Los Angeles proved so interesting that an audience cluster of about 20 or 25 — mostly Bard students – sat an hour after the session had ended listening in rapt attention to the speakers perched on the edge of the auditorium stage.
Among the other invited speakers were a pair of professors, one Palestinian and the other Israeli; an accomplished writer, journalist and filmmaker who almost lost his life in Afghanistan; a northern Ireland native who talked about how 30 years of sectarian victimhood on that unhappy island was finally ended; a veteran researcher who has contended that competitiveness among males was a taught behavior rather than a natural trait; and a pair of Black cultural commentators who discussed where race fell in their hierarchy of identities.
The other roles
Berkowitz certainly has an eye for relevant diversity, but so heady a brew requires a container. His second role provided a sturdy one.
Each conference session had a moderator, usually a faculty member, to serve as interlocutor between speaker and audience. Speakers typically had 15 or 20 minutes to say what they had to say. The moderator would then make a comment or ask a question or two before opening the floor for audience questions. Assistants with mics provided equal aural status to expert and questioner, a method that encouraged extensive audience participation.
The third role requires knowing one’s audience. Bard’s core following consists of alumni and alumnae, retired faculty and moneyed neighbors of various fashionable vintages, plus a mix of Bard students and those from other schools at events. These folks enjoy being with each other. Given the opportunity, they learn from each other. The Hannah Arendt Center’s programming successfully provided a magical illusion of intimacy in the 300-seat Olin Auditorium plus adjoining circular atrium.
Berkowitz’s final role is that of shepherd. At the beginning of each element of the program, he sat or stood unobtrusively at the rear of the auditorium. As the programming approached the end of each allotted time period, he would move forward and take a seat in the front row. If that signal failed, as it often did, Berkowitz would stand up at the edge of the stage. If necessary, he would interrupt the proceedings to remind those seated above that a new flock needed to take the stage.
I asked him how long the Arendt Center had been in existence before the conferences began. I learned that the Hannah Arendt conferences had come first, the Hannah Arendt Center later.
The spok en word came before the written word.
What happens to you happens to me
Emotions disfigure politics, thought Hannah Arendt, an émigré from Nazi Germany. Political movements should be based on rational argument, not passion. Emotions can too easily be used to manipulate people.
Sebastian Junger was a dominating contributor to this year’s Bard conference. The “accomplished writer, journalist and filmmaker who almost lost his life in Afghanistan” referred to in the main article, Junger has the temerity to suggest that it is indeed emotion and not reason that motivates us. A sense of the shared victimhood of our group — just or unjust — is sufficient for us to feel entitled to revenge.
We weren’t willing to turn our lives over to a world with a single government, Arendt believed. We’d rather keep this world of injustice rather than do that.
The patriotism that once caused so many Americans to give up their lives for love of country no longer exists among liberals. In Junger’s view, American liberals always talk about equity and rarely about security. American conservatives always talk about security and rarely about equity, We need both.
There’s now a 50-50 split between the two megafactions. They live in separate worlds, with the social media exacerbating the differences between them more each day. How can Americans scale up back to the tribal feeling that we are one and that what happens to you happens to me to the entire society like it used to be?
His suggestions are modest. Vote. Donate blood. Serve jury duty. Mandatory national service for young people. Meetings between adherents of both.
Junger’s latest book, this year’s “In My Time of Dying,” tells of his life-and-death experience embedded with the 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan. Wrote one reviewer, “He has a gift of placing you in the seat next to him to experience the moment.”
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