Recovering the Tribe

Leaving a tribe that has lost its way, abandoning the group entirely, is always an option. But it’s an isolated response in that it rescues the person but not the tribe. Is there any way to recover a tribe that has drifted towards evil? I think sifting through historical examples actually offers some hope.

(Seventh in a series that starts here)

Case in point, Nazi Germany. We didn’t just end the war, we conquered the Nazis. We occupied the country and dissolved the government and put the leaders on trial. We left no doubt that the country was defeated and their leaders had failed. We set up new systems—and then we turned them back over to the Germans. And the Germans did the hard work of facing their failings, recognizing their faults, and building up a new society that would not repeat the errors of the old.

Same thing in Imperial Japan. They didn’t do as well as the Germans in facing up to the problems of the old order, but after a total defeat and occupation that included the Emperor’s renunciation of divinity, they did rebuild a transformed society on new principles.

Counterpoint, one among many: The post-Civil War American South. Grant intentionally treated his defeated foes with all deference. The South’s military officers were not court-martialed for abandoning their posts. Southern state capitals were occupied and state governments replaced, but Southern landowners were not dispossessed of their acres or made to pay restitution to the slaves whose labor made them rich, and the machinery of government was soon handed back.

The result was that the South never thought it was defeated. “Save your Confederate money. The South will rise again!” As a culture, they were never forced to reckon with their errors. As a tribe, they did not change—they did not adopt new values, new perspectives, new stories to make sense of the world. And so for the next 50 years they sought and found ways to restore the essence of the old order, through violence and intimidation, through the Redemption movement, and through the establishment of Jim Crow.

So I believe history has an answer, but it’s a harsh answer: Yes you can recover a tribe from evil, but you have to destroy the evil. You have to rip it out root and branch. You have to discredit the whole tribe entirely. You have to disgrace and humiliate their leaders, maybe shoot a few.

Speaking personally, I really don’t like that conclusion. I would much rather stand with Grant and Lincoln, reaching out the hand of friendship to the recently-defeated adversaries. It seems so much more mature. But the examples suggest “mature” isn’t effective whereas a much cruder approach might be.

Which ought to give us pause, those like me who have romantic ideas of nobility in victory, or of the righteousness of holding back, of being a good sportsman, of allowing the other side space to maintain their own self-respect. If those ideas don’t work, they aren’t “mature.” They’re just foolish.

Of course, these are not theoretical questions in this place and at this time. As we organize in resistance to the forces Trump has brought together there are plenty who argue for moderation and accommodation. The idea of reaching across the aisle, of looking for common ground is seductive. Hell, I’m seduced by it.

But it’s not at all clear that it’s wise or right, or even humane. If people are in error and need to be corrected—understanding that we are talking about the type of error that is not just a matter of opinion but somewhere on the scale of moral evil, such as slavery or, say, putting kids in cages or torturing prisoners—taking the Archangel Michael or Jesus with the money-changes as your role model might be better than the popular conception of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. (Because in reality, of course our non-violent icons such as Gandhi and King were looked on as extremist troublemakers in their day. Because we view their lives with the knowledge of what came next, it’s hard to appreciate what a slap in the face they were to their contemporaries.)

It’s also not clear how our, presumably correct, ideas can even get a hearing if we don’t fight for them. If we  can’t fight for what we believe in because we’re afraid of scaring people away, how will our ideas ever be heard?

And the raw political calculus—if your natural allies lose interest in your project because you’ve watered it down to appeal to the other side, and the other side will never join you because they don’t agree with the project in the first place, who do you have left on your side? It’s not a strategy that has ever worked—all the way back in the pre-Civil War days Frederick Douglass was talking about a governor of Rhode Island who was working on a new state constitution, but lost the fight because he watered it down to the point where neither the progressives nor the reactionaries would vote for it.

But why? If we are rational beings, why is it necessary to do all this root-and-branch destruction? Why can’t we be the noble victors?

Because, I think, it’s not enough to win. We have to perform victory.