Tribe by Sebastian Junger -- The Ancient Roots of Many Problems of the Modern World

In October, I went a conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.  The first and featured speaker was Sebastian Junger, author of seven books that, in part, describe the lives of modern tribes in America including soldiers, commercial fishermen, and others who risk their lives in their work.  Junger said, "The real and ancient meaning of tribe is the community that you live in, that you share resources with, that you would risk your life to defend."

He is also the co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo, the record of a year with soldiers on one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. The soldiers of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team are the definition of a tribe.

Humans as a species are tribal.  Forming tribes and living as tribes describes most of human history. In the book, Junger shows that people who live without tribes, without the community and deep connections tribes afford, are adrift and often unhappy without knowing why.  

Junger said it was a commonplace in frontier America that people who went from civilization to Native American tribal life did not come back.  Whatever civilization could offer, those who left would not return. 

As I read the book, I felt I was learning the secret code of my life--the yearning for a tribe.  I grew up in a Boston suburb in the 1950s and 60s, not connected to extended family or religion or even a sports team.  I joined the military shortly after high school graduation in 1971 and loved being part of a group with a mission. I got out after being blinded in a missile explosion, but healed completely and re-enlisted within a year.  

After three years as a tank commander on the East-West border, I got out, went to college, got a professional job, then a quarter-century later re-enlisted and deployed to Iraq for a year.  That deployment ended 15 years ago this month.   

In an odd twist, I saw Restrepo right after it was released in late June 2010 in an NYC theater, a few months after I returned from deployment.  I walked out of the theater and wanted to go to Afghanistan.  

Belonging to a tribe has been normal for we humans in all of recorded history and before.  The cosmopolitan drive in us allows great learning, great invention, modern medicine and all the wonders of the modern world, but it does satisfy our need for deep human connection.  Tribes do that. Tribe, the book, explains the history and present reality of the tribal impulse in our lives.

The French Roots of Sinatra's "I Did It My Way"

In November 1968, Frank Sinatra told his friend and collaborator Paul Anka that he was tired and ready to give up show business. Sinatra had asked Anka several times to write a song for him, but Anka had been intimidated.  He saw himself writing teen songs.  During dinner Sinatra said, "You never wrote me that song."

Still reeling over the news at 1 a.m. in his apartment, he found himself toying with lyrics to a melody he had heard in France. “I thought, ‘What would Frank do with this melody, if he were a writer?’” Anka says. “And all of a sudden, it just came to me: ‘And now the end is near. I face the final curtain.’”

Anka knew the melody for these words.  A few months before,  Anka was in the  south of France and heard a song called Comme d'habitude which can be translated "as per usual."  More loosely "same old shit." The melody was written by Jaques Revaux with lyrics by Claude Francois and Gilles Thibault.  The sad song was about a man in his mid 30s who was left (dumped) by his much younger (teenage) lover.  Anka wrote a completely different lyruc on the same melody.

Anka gave the song to Sinatra who recorded it before the end of the year.  In  1969, I Did It My Way was an instant hit around the world and became a signature song for Sinatra for the rest of his life.  

Sinatra did not quit show business.  

In the 1960s most pop music traveled from from the United States and England to the rest of the world. I was fascinated to learn the story of a hit song in France that became a very different song in America.  

 

For the Sweep of History, Read New Books First

Asked about the five books someone should read to get a broad view of the history of the world, the historian Walter Russell Mead said we should read the Bible, Thucydides, Xenophon, other histories from the ancient world and, oddly, The Life of Lord Marlborough by Winston Churchill.  

(I have read several books by Churchill.  His book about his ancestor is the best thing I have read by him, but it seemed a strange addition to a short list. )

While I love Walter Russell Mead's take on many things, I disagree with his recommendations.

First, I strongly believe that reading ancient books in translation will leave the reader with more questions than answers.  Translation is interpretation, leaving many occasions for misunderstanding. Also, history written at the time it happens can never be comprehensive. Modern scholarship has added much the story Thucydides tells. Partly because Thucydides was a participant in the wars he wrote about, he seems to have taken Alcibiades at his word when Alcibiades was manipulating events to gain power. That story is very well told in The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.   

Instead of beginning with the ancients, I recommend reading several sweeping one-volume histories of the world or a great era by historians of great reputation in the reader's own language--in my case, English. 

 

The most recent book I read in this genre is Why the West Rules for Now by Ian Morris.  A French friend told me about it. He read it in English. The book includes the parallel development of civilization in the East and the West. If I were to recommend only one book, Morris's book would be it. 

Another delightful book is The Dawn of Everything by the two Davids, Graeber and Wengrow. Much more biology than the Morris book so a wider perspective.  

In his book Prisoners of Geography Tim Marshall makes clear that where we stand in the world gives us a vastly different perspective on life and history.  I love this book and found nothing comparable in its focus.

Civilization  by Niall Ferguson covers just a half millennium from 1500 to now, but it's the one we live in so it's very important for us.  Ferguson, like Morris, explains why the plague-ridden western end of the Asian continent (Europe) rose from backwater to world dominance.  It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. (Originally written in Hebrew, Sapiens was translated into English with the author working on it.  Harari is multi-lingual and speaks and writes in English.)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium, along with as the title says, guns, germs and steel. 

Finally, if you decide to take Mead's advice and read the Bible, I urge you to read a translation by one man (I will be happy to recommend a one-woman translation when one is available.) NOT a committee.  I am currently reading Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He is very thorough and his footnotes on the complexities of the Hebrew are very clear and readable.

For the Christian Scripture, I suggest David Bentley Hart.  Like Alter, his notes are brilliant. He is an Orthodox theologian who has pissed off most of Christendom with his opinions expressed in many books.  He has even said Hell does not exist to make sure he has enmity from every direction.  I read The Gospel of John and the letters of John in Greek recently. I used Hart's translation when I was stuck. Which happened a lot.  

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

In the hopeful world of self-help books the reader is drawn into the possibility of changing her life for the better.  We  could all be thinner, more organized, better read, faster, more calm, more mindful, less wasteful and any number of personal improvements.  

Much of the advice is incremental--the steps toward the goal, not the leap.  Michael Easter gives the reader the steps toward the leap.  The central event of the book is a month-long trek with 80-pound packs through the wilderness of northern Alaska hunting caribou.  

On the way he tells us how hunger, boredom, exhaustion, cold, dirt and other forms of discomfort will make our lives happier and better.  The book is full of the latest research showing how discomfort makes us stronger, smarter, tougher and happier.  

It is also very well written.  And if you are the kind of person who exercises a lot, fasts, endures boredom and strives to live better, the book will challenge you to do something even more extreme. 

I like this book for the obvious confirmation basis that I get from it. It also added walking with a heavy pack--rucking--to things I want to do more of. 

I would love to hear how you strain toward self improvement.  

I wrote two other posts responding to the book. They were on boredom and dirt.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

 Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to come.  The car in the middle lane doesn't move when the light turns green. The driver is blind.  I was surprised and then laughed asking myself, 'Why is a blind man in the driver's seat?' 

He has gone suddenly blind.  A weird white blindness. He cannot see anything except bright whiteness.  Pedestrians and other drivers help him from the car.  One drives the afflicted man home--then steals his car. His later retribution for his theft is horrible and final. We get the feeling of the terrible events to come from the first case of blindness.  

Very soon the personal tragedy becomes a wider and wider apocalypse of white blindness.  The first victim and many others are sent to an abandoned mental hospital. At that point, the story becomes The Lord of the Flies with adults.  Adults can try to impose order and care for each other, but when that fails, adults can be far more horrible than the worst children. In addition to theft, beatings and murder, rape adds another dimension of terror. 

The novel is gripping from first page to last.  I really wanted to know what would happen to the central characters as they and the world descended further and further into chaos.  In Blindness Jose Saramago shows us what life would be like with the whole world going blind. There's no water. No one cleans. Civilization breaks down. Tribes are all that is left. 

In the military, one of the expressions used to indicate a soldier is in very deep trouble is, "You are in a world of shit." The world of Blindness really is a "world of shit." Confined blind people shit in hallways. Walking means stepping in shit. Released from confinement blind people wander the streets of the city, and the streets and buildings become latrines.  

With everyone going blind no one can deliver food--or anything else.  Saramago writes vividly about this world of terror and filth. 

I will stop here. Endings should be experienced.  If you read dystopian books, I could not recommend this book more highly. 

My favorite dystopian novel is the post-nuclear-holocaust story A Canticle for Liebowitz. Blindness is just as brilliant, just as surprising, just as terrifying.

Blindness was one of the seventeen novels published by Saramago, a total of more than thirty books including poetry essays, diaries and children's books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998 for his work. 

"Never Eat With Dirty Hands" Advice I Didn't Follow

 

In the 10th grade at Stoneham High School near Boston our biology teacher, Sonia Jones, told us "Never eat with dirty hands!" She explained all of the germs we were learning about would sicken and kill if we ate with dirty hands.  She was six feet tall and had a regal way of speaking. Her advice was memorable.

That class was in the 1968-69 school year.  Nine years later in the fall of 1977, my tank blew its engine in the early morning in the woods near the east-west border in Germany.  My crew and I got down in a hull full of oil and readied the tank to get a new engine. Then we waited for the M88 tank recovery vehicle to show up with our new 1750 cubic-inch, twin turbo, V12 power plant. 

We also had no food except our emergency rations. We had been in the woods for more than a month and had eaten most of the extra food we brought with us.  

Several hours later the M88 showed up and we got a new engine.  We were covered in grease and oil from the broken V12 diesel engine.  Just before dark, the first sergeant showed up in a Jeep with the last remnants of breakfast in a Mermite can.

He had bacon and eggs and white bread.  We all grabbed bread, scooped eggs and bacon onto one slice bread, made a sandwich with the other slice and started eating.  I looked at the black fingerprints on my white bread slices and thought of our tall, stern biology teacher and how horrified she would be at our sandwiches.   

I kept eating.  

NB: I asked my classmates about the name of the biology teacher. I got five suggestions before Steve Burke identified her as Sonia Jones.  We were sure of the ID because she had a unique way of sneezing: she sneezed ten times ina row with a sound like "wheeeeeeetz!" Thansk Stoneham High SchoolClass of 1971.

 

International Neighborhood Near the Panama Canal

 

Less than a kilometer from my AirBnb is a short road that connects a residential area with the main bus route to the city.  At one end is the massive 7-story Russian embassy.  At the other end is a little Russian Orthodox Church which is currently closed for construction. 

My wife and I walk by it several times a week after dinner.  Last night we met a young couple walking down the hill toward the church with their young toddler. We were walking up.  The family was Russian, part of the staff at the embassy.  

For many reasons, Panama is home to people who came from across the region and around the world.  Three blocks away is a Korean Church.  Every convenience store I have been to on the east side of the city is run by Koreans.  

The fresh fruit market nearby is run by Venezuelans. Cruise ships dock on both coasts bringing tourists from the whole world.      

Today I went to the convenience store closest to my house.  The young woman who runs the store (while taking care of two small children) has been very pregnant recently. When I walked in the store her husband, who is usually stocking shelves, was holding a very young baby. Mom had just walked into the  back room.  A teenage girl was at the counter.  I said "Felicidades! Dos dias?" He nodded and said  yes, two days old. 

A very international neighborhood.