One of the fatal flaws of human morality is that it never developed an adequate remedy for our deeply held tribal instincts.  For more than 150 millennia prior to the emergence of the vast civilizations that we are familiar with today, humans lived in small bands of 20 to 50 people.  That is the context in which morality evolved, encouraging our distant ancestors to share food and other resources for the sake of group survival.  As Darwin famously pointed out, moral communities outcompete nonmoral ones because they work together more efficiently.¹ 

Small in-group efficiencies did not guarantee a survival benefit for out-group collaborative feelings, however.  This is the fatal flaw that civilizations and their myriad morality-boosting institutions—from organized religions that preach neighborly love to police forces that incarcerate miscreants of an ever-expanding variety—have been battling to overcome ever since.  How to encourage citizens of increasingly large city-states to get along with strangers (outsiders) has been the great moral crisis of every budding civilization. 

You might think that after more than five thousand years of practice in the moral arts of human civility we would have learned the bitter lessons of our inborn limitations.  That does not seem to be the case, as the blemished record of human history all too clearly demonstrates.  Look at the state of American politics today.  Republicans and Democrats are engaged in rancorous culture wars that undermine even the feigned appearance of good manners.  It would be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the United States has become a gridlocked, ungovernable nation.  Stoking this seething discontent are fake-furious talking heads who engage in endless tit for tat fake-debates about alternative facts and conspiracy theories that nobody with an ounce of sense has the fortitude to heed. 

What went wrong with America?  Nothing, perhaps, except for one forgotten moral lesson.  We need to be reminded (constantly) that our civil aspirations are part of a fragile, unfinished project that is incapable of erasing the tribal instincts that are part of us.  Nothing revitalizes those instincts quicker than an apparently stark (simplistic) choice between friend and foe.  After all, this is how instincts work to our advantage when we are facing danger.  There is only a split second to decide between the right course of action, and the wrong one.  Any hesitation, or deliberation, and it is too late.  These instinctive patterns are embedded in our brain chemistry, and it would be foolish indeed to discount them.  We must never forget that something as seemingly inconsequential as the lightness or darkness of our skin can still trigger the most brutal tribal instincts.  Even the simple act of wearing a face mask to stop the spread of the covid-19 pandemic proved to be a trigger for our latent tribalism.   

How can we mitigate the dyadic tribalism of our politics now that it has already entrenched itself?  For starters, I think we need to open the primary election process so that all voters have a stake in who ends up on the ballot for a general election.  Why should unbending Democrats and Republicans be allowed to exclude people from other parties—or no party at all, like the growing category of Independents—from having a voice in who will represent our nation?  The well-documented strategic positioning dilemma in our two-step election process (first a primary, then a general election) has contributed to the paralytical distinction between left and right that serves as a dyadic trigger to tribalism.  As Richard Nixon observed long ago, a Republican running for national office must hew to the right in the primary to satisfy the right-leaning party base, then hew to the middle in the general election to satisfy the moderate majority.  (Democrats must do the exact opposite.)  I think we must derail this polarizing process by opening every primary to all registered voters, regardless of party affiliation.                 

The transition to being the civilized creatures that we aspire to be is unfinished.  We must be vigilant in the face of the potential dyadic triggers that lurk beneath the surface of our own moral nature.  One of the problems with American politics is that we have an inflexible two-party system that triggers our tribal instincts.  We have set up a system that plays into one of our worst tendencies, which is to see the other side as the enemy.  This is the essence of tribalism. 

Notes:

1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (John Murray, 1882), p. 166.