Tribalism is a state that humans often take on where they become grouped together with similar ideas or goals. Tribalism is also known as group loyalty because people will seek out other people they have something in common with and become increasingly loyal to that because of the commonality of the group. Tribalism usually refers to something shared by birth such as culture, race, country, or religion. Tribalism also is used when talking about conformity in popular culture and social groups.
The most common type of tribalism is that of western religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. People gather around their commonly belief in a God and will often fiercely, even violently, defend the integrity of their beliefs. These “tribes” most frequently have conflict between each other, usually to establish the dominance of their values. The Crusades that took place in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1095 and 1410 were based on the Christian’s desire to take the Holy Land from the Islamic rule. Pope Urban II and the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, used the tribalism of Christianity to rally armies from across Europe for the first crusade. These tribal leaders used god, the different army’s shared thing, as motivation to march on the Holy Land and fight the occupants. Over the next four centuries hundreds of thousands were killed over multiple crusades to Jerusalem, all to defend their religions under the veil of tribalism. Even up to recent times and into the present day, countries use religion to justify large scale conflicts. The modern conflicts between Israel and Pakistan, which has roots over three thousand years old, stems from a struggle between Judaism and Islam in the Middle East. But tribalism isn’t just an older world idea, there are many examples of tribalism in our world today.
A more modern sense of tribalism comes from loyalty to social groups and different things in popular culture. People commonly group around music, clothing styles and many other shared interests. People also tend to group together because of shared politics, social status, or fraternity developed through a shared place or institution. These more modern examples of tribalism aren’t developed from a belief or faith that is shared among a large group of people like the older religious tribes are; these develop more often through taste and life experience. Tribalism is very evident in universities. Groups of students who have the same, or very similar goals, become tightly bonded by sharing those experiences. Tribalism today is less about conflict or trying to establish dominance. Modern tribalism is more of a state of being where we seek out others with similarities to ourselves for comfort and for validation.
Tribalism manifests itself in many different forms. Whether it comes from something a group of people share by nature of birth, like nationality or religion, or something that develops throughout life by experience. Being together in a group is the most natural state of being for humans because of the sense of strength in numbers and the comfort that it provides.
Duncan Simmons
Cosmos|Hearth 