Michael Morris
Brief Bio: works as a cultural psychologist at Columbia University in its Graduate School of Business and its Psychology Department
Lived: 1961?
For further info: www.michaelwmorris.com
Quotes:
“Cultural complexity began to expand exponentially”
Once all three tribal instincts [the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct] were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways. Within an evolutionary eyeblink, they suddenly had much more sophisticated tools, weapons, arts, and rituals. After millions of years of achingly slow change, cultural complexity began to expand exponentially. The pools of shared knowledge in human communities began to accumulate across generations and adapt to local ecologies. This tribe-level learning (not heightened individual brainpower) is the secret to how our kind adapted to widely differing climates and terrains. Humans became the earth’s dominant species, threatened only by our own success.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined”
…by the late twentieth century, it became hard to miss that cultural patterns — of societies and of individuals — were in flux. Across the world, societies were evolving as globalized generations developed new lifestyles through selective retention of their parents’ ways and heightened borrowing from other traditions. Individuals were migrating more than ever but not always assimilating — instead, maintaining multiple cultural worldviews that they switched between situationally. Scholars began to appreciate that it was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Humans are the tribal animal”
Humans … cooperate based on kinship and friendship, but we also have more powerful forms of social glue that other species lack. From the early Stone Age, we started evolving specialized brain systems that facilitated sharing knowledge in groups. If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. Then you could work in closer coordination with each other by following this shared script. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of common knowledge: different cultures. Members of each group gained increased mutual understanding; even if the topic wasn’t coconuts, the common ground of shared coconut expertise could help in learning other survival-relevant skills. Group membership became increasingly manifest in behavior, making peers more similar, predictable, and sympathetic. Our forebears began to experience the elevating sense of “Us,” an expansion of identity beyond close kinship and direct friendship to a broader group. In these larger clans, they began to highlight their membership through distinctive styles of dress and self-adornment. At the same time, human brains kept evolving to share new kinds of knowledge, such as reputation in these broader groups, all of which further boosted our fitness as social animals. In time, interactions using new forms of knowledge, such as ritual, coalesced across clans to forge broad networks of sharing in mates, resources, and knowledge. Humans began feeling solidarity with these large communities (thousands of other people living in small groups nested within larger groups) held together by the glue of common cultural knowledge. This form of social organization is not a hive or a troop but a tribe.
Surviving through sharing knowledge in these solidaristic, nested groups is tribal living. With apologies to Aristotle, it’s misleading to call humans “the social animal.” We are more accurately “the tribal animal.”
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Our tribal instincts are not bugs”
Especially in a time of powerful and shifting politics, we shouldn’t ignore our quintessential human capacities to bond with our communities. Nor should we delude ourselves that the thin gruel of rationality and universalism will mobilize people to accomplish desired goals.
I write as a convert to the advocacy of tribalism. I used to consider group-related instincts as a detrimental force in human affairs. I was raised (as you may have been too) to see rationality, creativity, and morality as the hallmarks of humanity, and I viewed conformity, status-seeking, and traditionalism as fallibilities. But based on what I’ve learned from decades as a behavioral scientist, I’ve come to see my former humanities worldview as naive, or at least incomplete. Our tribal instincts are not bugs in the system that hinder an otherwise intelligent species. They are the distinguishing features of our kind that enabled its evolutionary ascent—and still drive many of its greatest achievements today. They are not human foibles that hold us back; they are human superpowers that create our distinctive cultures.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Rationality is not the strong suit of our species”
My recommendations are not the typical tips from an academic about how to encourage more rational decisions. I think that rationality is not the strong suit of our species. We are Homo tributus, not Homo economicus. Certainly, tribal instincts are part of the problem in many pressing conflicts, but they also can be — and, I think, have to be — part of the solution.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Three Layers of Tribal Instincts”
In this book, I peel the onion of our special human talent for sharing with groups to distinguish three layers of “tribal instincts.” They originated in the Stone Age, but we can still recognize these evolved systems in our minds and hearts today. Our sideways glances at classmates, coworkers, and neighbors are part of the peer instinct, as is our impulse to mesh with their patterns in our everyday inferences and actions. Our upward-directed fascination with celebrities, CEOs, MVPs, and other elites comes from the hero instinct, as do our aspirations for glory and our drive to contribute. Our backward-gazing nostalgia is part of the ancestor instinct, as is the comfort we find in traditions and the duty we feel to maintain them. These instincts are like three characters inside every person: the conformist who seeks belonging and understanding, the contributor who dreams of esteem and tribute, and the traditionalist who cherishes continuity. Each of these systems has its fallibilities, but—as we’ll see—each generally guides people in adaptive directions.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“The Three Tribal Instincts”
For a better understanding of the partisan conflict straining US democracy and the role of our evolved group psychology within it, we can do better by focusing on the three tribal instincts that we have come to know in this book. These are psychological systems for meshing with peers, helping the clan, and maintaining the tribe. These drives have helped human groups survive from the Stone Age to today because they guide constructive collaboration.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“Tribal living is what made us truly human”
In Tribal, I hope to reclaim the original meaning of the word as community enabled by shared culture. This is how humankind first transcended the narrow bonds of kith and kin to accomplish bigger things in clans. And it’s how we later ventured into exchange and collaboration with strangers in the broader networks called “tribes.” In these nested groups, our forebears first felt the empowering experience of access to myriad individuals and ideas, the ongoing experiment that we call society. It was an engine for group change and differentiation. By showing that tribal living is the source of cultural change and progress, I hope to put to rest any lingering association of tribes with stasis and primitivism. Tribal living is what made us truly human.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
“We internalize new cultural identities and codes”
Contrary to essentialist views of cultural character as set in stone, people’s cultural conditioning and convictions change over time. We internalize new cultural identities and codes with every new community we join.
2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together