The problem arises when religious groups come into contact with each other, especially as they become components of larger political structures. Each, thinking it has a monopoly on ultimate truth, seeks to set the moral compass for a society. Inasmuch as any one group succeeds, others will be alienated, so government, at its best, should foster an ethos that embraces the widest possible segment of its constituents. As one of the primary functions of any social structure is to foster group cohesion through suppressing threats to the group, threats we might loosely refer to as deviancy, it follows that as the components of the social system become more heterogeneous, the scope of what is defined as deviancy is narrowed.
One can see this, for instance, in the evolution of what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior in the United States. The topic is too large to be adequately detailed here, so I hope a thumbnail sketch will suffice: from a puritanical (in the literal and figurative senses) beginning where the only socially acceptable sexual behavior was between and man and his wife, with everything else considered deviance. Over the intervening years, sexual mores gradually relaxed until, three hundred years later, homosexual behavior, which in the puritan ethos was a great crime worthy of capital punishment, passes for the most part with barely a shrug. Generally, it should go without saying, men and women gradually and unevenly became more freely able to engage openly in sexual behavior that in previous generations would have received censure.
That this coincides with the creation of the United States from separate colonies, the new nation's territorial expansion, the great waves of urbanization and immigration, and the tightening web of globalization is no coincidence. This is not a new phenomenon. Urbanization is the common thread, and urbanization has been the great cultural driver in human history since the first cities were founded. In cities, disparate peoples come together and begin exchanging ideas as readily as they exchange genes. Cities also, however, provided a haven for dissidents and the adventuresome, those who in village life might have run up against social strictures, to find one another and begin forming communities of their own. Heretics and reformers alike could find an audience and though passions might be stirred, the requirements of city life meant that a basic detente usually held, and when a group was sufficiently radical to shatter that, it was dealt with.
But we have seen, beginning in earnest in the late 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right and its political alliance with the Republican party, the beginning of a counter-liberalization, a rejection of detente. Reasserting older, more restrictive values, conservative evangelicals have enjoyed a four-decade run where, in various places, they have imposed their social vision. This coincides with perhaps the two greatest forces of social transformation we have seen yet--the rise of cable television and the Internet.
At first glance, cable television and the Internet seem to offer a number of places for a plurality of voices to be heard. The possibility that they might, to borrow a phrase from Mao, "let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend" seemed very real. Yet there was another possibility, one that voices of the new conservative movement appear to have noticed before anyone else. The proliferation of channels and chatrooms offered a separate space where like-minded people could come together and reinforce their own sense of America's decline and of religious persecution. In these echo chambers, they were able to attain a sense of pristine purpose without the obligation to entertain counter-narratives.
Modern communications, especially cable and the Internet, allow those who might have been marginalized before, potential heretics and reformers each, to gather and join forces. They can work towards expanding the promise of America, implicit in the founding documents, in the hopes, perhaps, of forming a "more perfect Union." But they can also work towards restricting the promise, towards restoring the older order that represents a golden age.
This is what I refer to as the new tribalism. Virtual relationships offer, it would seem, a greater possibility for people to come together with people who only agree with them. This holds for people on any side of a given issue, but seems more prevalent on the political right. Such gathering will serve only to reinforce one's opinions and to help foster an "us against them" mentality. When you no longer have to interact with real people who might disagree with you, the concord that holds a society together weakens. Our interactions with real people, who might put the lie to the caricatures we create, force us to confront that real humans believe differently from us, suffer. With nothing to leaven radical opinions, we become increasingly radicalized, and increasingly unable to talk to each other. Our new tribe becomes our social universe, the locus of our most meaningful relationships.
The good news is that most of us don't inhabit this world. The bad news is that the loudest forces of reaction either inhabit this world, or are able to harness its resentments, and the harm they can do is incalculable. The cure is the same as it's always been--engagement with those who will be engaged, an open ear and a closed mouth and, above all, the realization that those who disagree with us are not our enemies, but rather our fellow citizens and that their concern for the future is as real as ours. We may not come to agreement, but the real sin is not failure, but not to try.
Note: I originally posted this a few years ago. Somehow this was linked by something, to the effect that it was being accessed constantly. Views of this piece constitute something like 25 percent of my total views, for no apparent reason. I reverted it to draft and am re-posing it due to interactions online.
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