Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent, they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.”

Junger has been discussing whites who chose tribal society over colonial society, but he is using this historical phenomenon to speak about the present period. This is an example of how Junger uses the motif of the tribe to build his argument about the limitations of modern society and the desirability of tribalism.  

“Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of what ethnicity they are.”

Junger is summarizing the unique ills of modern society compared with tribal society. For instance, either indigenous tribes experienced no suicide whatsoever, or when they did, it was not rooted in psychological causes as it largely is today. Modern societies, by contrast, have suicide rates as high as 25 cases per 100,000 people; and the World Health Organization reports that rates of depression are significantly higher in wealthy countries.

“It’s revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught.”

After recounting the reciprocity and group accountability that characterized tribal societies, Junger pivots to consider the lack of these characteristics in modern society. The example of Wall Street serves as his primary evidence of how human relations in the modern world are so frayed, and accountability structures so diminished, that fraud is endemic to the financial industry. 

“The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life.”

Junger had just related the story of when he received his draft card in the mail after turning 18 and boasted to his father how he was not going to sign it. Junger assumed his father would endorse his declaration because his father had become “vehemently antiwar” as a result of Vietnam. Instead, his father reminded him that US soldiers had “saved the world from fascism” in World War II and that thousands of young American men were buried in his homeland of France; therefore, he owed his country something (36-37). Junger explains that this moment clarified for him that he had an obligation to make the most of the opportunities he got in life to be part of something bigger than himself. This is one of his core tribal sensibilities. 

“If there’s an image of the Apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high-rise. In different circumstances it could be any of us, anywhere, but it had happened to him here, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I nodded to him and he nodded back and then I left him in peace.”

When Junger went to Sarajevo to report on the war there, he encountered numerous strange things, “the kinds of contortions that only war can bring to a people” (42). This moment was the strangest: a 20th-century man, in all the trappings of the modern world—business suit, high-rise office building—performing the most mundane act of primordial society, building a fire with sticks to cook his dinner. At this point in the book, this anecdote served primarily to describe the scene of war in the former Yugoslavia; as the book goes on, this image of the Apocalypse, as Junger puts it, serves as a sign of how the modern world immediately falls away during war.

“Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.”

As part of Junger’s chapter on how war reduces humans to their base instincts, he begins a protracted discussion of World War II and the unity that it spawned among civilian populations on both England and Germany. It is interesting to observe here that Junger appears to believe that human nature is essentially good, which appears paradoxical for someone who has studied war so thoroughly. Of course, Junger also believes that, to an extent, war is good for people. All paradoxes turn themselves into new insights by inverting prior assumptive logics. 

“The gunman demanded that Muslim and Christian passengers separate themselves into two groups so that the Christians could be killed, but the Muslims—most of whom were women—refused to do it. They told the gunmen that they would all die together if necessary, but that the Christians would not be singled out for execution. The Shabaab eventually let everyone go.”

This anecdote is part of Junger’s discussion of how men and women have qualities that emerge in crisis. According to Junger, women are more likely to display moral courage. He attributes courage to greater empathic powers, a quality that women tend to demonstrate more than men. Junger naturalizes these gendered differences. 

“What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.”

Junger uses this statement to pivot between an anecdote about a mining accident in Nova Scotia and a description of life under siege in Sarajevo. In both instances, Junger shows how individuals stepped into new roles within the group as needed for the group’s survival. The marvel of seeing the above insight applied to the Sarajevo case is that Junger was reporting on civilians’ experiences with war this time, not that of soldiers. It is indeed remarkable to find civilians who miss their wartime experience. 

“‘I missed being that close to people, I missed being loved in that way,’ she told me. ‘In Bosnia—as it is now—we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people. We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you.’”

A survivor of the Sarajevo siege explained why many in her generation are nostalgic for the war. In Junger’s terms, she experienced a brief moment when modern society receded and human relations resumed the natural mutuality that used to characterize tribal society. This quote points to the inexorable pull of modern society, a pull away from human connectedness, despite people’s consciously striving for it. 

“Any discussion of veterans and their common experience of alienation must address the fact that so many soldiers find themselves missing the war after it’s over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say, part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up.”

Here Junger is at his iconoclastic and provocative best: He is direct and logical but pulls the reader in through the blunt paradox he lays out. He goes on to discuss the human bonds borne of adversity, and soon enough, it makes perfect sense to the reader why people might miss war. 

“The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of the tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group.”

This quote encapsulates Junger’s patriotic dissenter perspective. He enjoins a long tradition of writers who lambast America for soiling its own principles. From Studs Terkel to James Baldwin, such writers have sought to excoriate American society to live up to its promise. This sentiment is deeply patriotic because there remains a sense that the United States has a destiny beyond that of other nations and that human civilization somehow hangs in the balance, contingent upon which path Americans end up choosing. 

“In a country that applies its standard of loyalty in such an arbitrary way, it would seem difficult for others to develop any kind of tribal ethos. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community—be that your neighborhood, your workplace, or your entire country. Obviously, you don’t need to be a Navy SEAL in order to do that.”

Junger followed a discussion of the gross decadence of Wall Street with a review of the Bowe Bergdahl case. The juxtaposition between how American leaders bitterly denounced Bergdahl for deserting his unit in Afghanistan and how they hardly criticized the CEOs of the banks that defrauded American homeowners and taxpayers is striking. For Junger this moral double-standard makes the path toward the “tribal way” murky at best—but not impossible, he insists. 

“He clearly understood that belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs. (‘It was better when it was really bad,’ someone spray-painted on a wall about the loss of social solidarity in Bosnia after the war ended.) That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history.”

At the end of Chapter 4, Junger recounts the story of a small businessman from the Bronx who quietly gave up his salary when his business hit hard times so that his employees could keep their jobs. The reader gets the clear sense that Junger could fill an entire book with such examples of the “tribal way.” He concludes the book with this story of an average man conducting himself exceptionally to leave readers with a note of inspiration.