A reply to Publius

About the tribe. When you say there is nothing akin to the high school
girl fretting about whether or not to go to the dance in tribal
society I think you may be mistaken. Firstly, even with a clear role -
a Maori warrior, for instance - there is still a need for judgement
about the right course of action in each particular situation. It may
often be obvious what a person ought to do, but not always. Secondly
might it not be diffficult to take the decision to act because of a
conflict between crystal clear tribal obligations and other values. It
is a custom, for instance, that sickly children are thrown from a
cliff, but is it easy to decide to give up one's own child? Thirdly,
might there not be a conflict of otherwise very clear ethical
imperatives? Think of Antigone. As a good sister she must bury her
dead brother but as a good citizen she must obey Creon and leave her
brother unburied. What is she to do? And in situations like this a
person might have to pay with their life if they make the wrong
decision. Doubtless tribal value systems keep these conflicts to a
minimum (and pre-Socratic Greece might not be sufficiently tribal for
you) but surely it does not eliminate them completely.

To supplement your thoughts about the absence of free will in the
tribe: Tribal life presupposed a belief that, at root, the future is
not up to us - it is not for us to decide. Hence all that star gazing
and all those chickens cut open so that their entrails could be
inspected for the signs of future good or ill fortune. In a strange
way the priority is not action, as it is for us (grabbing the steering
wheel and putting ones foot down on the gas of life), but knowledge
(knowing where one's destiny lies). For people brought up in a world
where it is the astronomers, not the astrologers, who know the truth
about the stars, there is no way back to that kind of mentality.

About the joy of the tribe: Was tribal life really so blissful? It
kept at bay for a long time any doubt about the most fundamental
values and didn't leave individuals feeling that they were caught in
the crossfire in a clash of civilisations, but was the tribe really a
recipe for happiness (assuming that happiness is relevant to the
matter at hand)? The institution of an arranged marriage, for
instance, cuts out completely the angst of indecision but it is not
necessarily a recipe for a happy marriage. Similarly, being born at
the wrong end of a caste system makes for a simple life, but not
necessarily a happy one.

About politics: In your first post you made the very strong claim that
all of politics is totalitarian in that it tries to impose a tribal
unity when tribal life has already disintegrated. Now, without wishing
to defend liberalism it seems a bit tricky to me to fit liberalism
into this definition of politics. On your reading, it seems that
liberal societies are simply political spaces in which pseudo tribes
compete for power. On merely empirical grounds, though, is this the
case? Don't lots of people (the majority perhaps) sincerely believe
the liberal discourse of human rights and the priority of the
individual that that discourse promotes? If your diagnosis (that what
society lacks is real tribalism) were correct, then psuedo tribalism
ought to be breaking out everywhere and the human rights discourse
ought to have few, if any, adherents and the ailing liberal order
ought to collapse overnight. You imply that the material advantages of
a market society keep people's minds off their homesickness but your
analysis implies a universal and very deep homesickness and it is
difficult to see how hire purchase hatchbacks and an endless stream of
gadgets could take people's minds off such a well of psychic pain. The
conclusion seems to be that the liberal discourse does actually
connect with something that is important to people, and so perhaps we
need to begin from there (not stop there, certainly, but accept that
the freedom of the individual is not a burden that must be thrown
off).

I agree that the human rights discourse and the ideas of individuality
that are associated with it and the market economy which they support
all deserve a thorough-going critique, and that there is a pressing
need to go beyond liberalsim, but I don't agree that what people lack
is the tribe.

I am a bit worried that the following might be an accurate summary of
your argument:

1 The individual in modern liberal societies is beset by a confusion
about the kind of values that could give a clear orientation to his or
her life.
2 There was no such confusion in tribal communities.
3 Therefore, ideally we ought to live in a tribe (irrespective of the
fact that we cannot partly because the psychological preconditions no
longer hold).

I agree with the premises, but I don't see that the conclusion
follows. Tribal life for us would be psychological suicide. So what we
need is a form of community life which goes beyond the liberal
insistence on an ultra-minimal public life without trying to impose a
tribal world view (which would immediately have the feminists, for
instance, out on the streets erecting barricades).