Here we are in 2018, and more divided then any other time in my thirty-one years on this planet. What happened? We are rewinding the evolutionary clock back 200,000 years. We are going back to the days of tribalism. Only, this doesn’t work so well now. We aren’t cave dwellers anymore. We live in the 21st century. We live in many tribes congruently. We have groupings for so many things. We have whites, blacks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, LGBTQQ…(I can’t keep up with the new letters), Americans, South Americans, and a countless amount of other groupings. What are the only commonalities of these labels? They refer to a person’s demographic description.
What do we get from these labels other than demographic stats? I would argue very little. This is not to say that there is not a commonality within groups. Let’s take Jews for instance. Take it from a Jew, but my Jewdar goes off when another member of the tribe is around. I can practically smell matzah balls in the air when a Jew is near. Jews talk to each other in a manner not unlike Jerry Seinfeld complaining about airline peanuts. My brother is gay, and we lived in Miami for years. My gaydar is pretty on point. When I see a man in hot pink short shorts, and a belly shirt listening to Cher I have a sneaking suspicion he’s gay. Okay, so there is something to be said about demographics. It isn’t the whole picture though.
The world is very complicated. We want to see it all black and white. We want to categorize cleanly, and have no error. We are human. We live in a physical realm. We learned about the world through its opposing forces. Our ancestors learned from the physical world. We learned hot from cold. We learned night from day. We learned feast from famine. Yes, we exist in the binary.
Yes, we are also a sexual dimorphic species as well. We have male and female. We aren’t plants. Plants are Andromonoecious, but some plants grow both male and female separately (like people).
To categorize was to survive back in our early days. Early man had to denote which berries to eat, and which not to eat. Mankind had to discern a predator from prey. Tribes were separate, and war was common. Tribes needed to know their tribe members from strangers. There’s a reason we’re adept at recognizing faces, and nuanced expressions.
We don’t live 200,000 years in the past. It’s 2018. Tribalism is too complicated. The arguments made on behalf of groups falls short. Groups are now not so concrete.
Take me for instance. I’m a Jew. I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. I’m a male. I’m straight. I’m blue collar. I’m a practitioner of jiu-Jitsu. I’m single. I’m blond. I’m an artist. I studied ballet with my mom. I’m don’t subscribe to a full doctrine of any political party. I have Puerto Rican cousins.
So, tell me what tribe I’m in. What privileges do I have? Jewish Nobel laureates make up 22.5% of the 892 individuals to win the award. I obviously am not a Nobel laureate. I am not rich. I lived across from the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. I worked hard, and saved to buy a small condo. I’m studying now to switch into a new line of work. I continue to read, push, work hard, and strive for a better future. I am not one to complain, well maybe kvetch once in a while. I did say I was Jewish right?
I’m not denying that I have imbued characteristics that I’ve monopolized on. Who doesn’t push their strengths? Lazy people don’t. Scared people don’t. That’s about it. It’s true across humanity. If you’re lazy, and/or scared then you don’t push.
So, There is something that rings true across the cross-section of humanity. Humanity is the thing itself that groups us together. More specifically it’s our hearts and minds.
My Jiu-Jitsu team is filled with all types of demographics. We are all so different on paper. We are different ages, sexes, colors, creeds, sexual orientations, and levels of fitness. We are a tribe. How are we a tribe?
Our hearts and minds are aligned. The demographic differences are meaningless when we look at who we are below the surface.
We, in the modern age, love to play the game of the “Oppression Olympics”. We love to argue about which group has it worse. We remove all culpability at the same time. We infantilize groups, and pit groups against one another. This gets tricky yet again, because what makes up a group?
There are gays for and against gay marriage. There are Jews for and against the two state solution. Women are divided in half on abortion. How do we discern groups?
We have a desire to carve out groups. Okay, I’ll go for that. Let’s carve out smaller and smaller groups. I can do without the Oppression Olympics, but let’s keep making smaller and smaller groups.
If we keep carving, and carving, and carving some more we’ll get somewhere. We’ll get to a point where we will take people as individuals. We’ll get to a place where people will be uniquely them, and not be able to play the game of tribalism.
Wouldn’t that be something? We could possibly get to a place beyond this insane modern day tribalism. We could get to a place where we could judge each other by the merit of our actions and not our demographic makeup. Wouldn’t that be the day? That’s sounds like a dream come true. That rings a bell. Who had this dream? It seems as though dreams like this were buried not long ago. Now, we are back 200,000 years in the past. We’ve devolved into cave dwellers once again only the caves are now empty (just like the rhetoric of the times).