Simplistic analysis of a sophisticate

Vincent J. Curtis

24 June 21

RE: What will it take to root out hatred and violence? Subtitled: The real problem is that our society and world are rooted in outdated and toxic tribalism.  By Alexander T. Polgar, Ph.D.  Dr. Polgar is an author who has written about the theme below for decades, most recently in a four book series on addiction.  Hamilton Spectator op-ed of 24 June 21.

Once again, Spec readers are blessed with a simplistic vision of the anointed, - those credentialed experts to whom we must defer our governance.  But since even a cat can look at a king, let’s look at the analysis.

“The underlying problem, and root cause of violence, hate, and intolerance, is that most of the world is developmentally stuck at the tribal stage perspective.  Consequently, the global population is not divided or polarized,” writes Dr. Polgar.  If I take the latter sentence first, he seems to be saying that the problem lies not with us cosmopolitan elites of the world, but with those cramped rubes who don’t share the elites’ broad vision.  The second sentence is otherwise a non-sequitur from the first.  The first sentence, in turn, is betrayed by its reductionism.

In the first place, the sentence, and the analysis in general, fails to distinguish the tribe from the individual.  The difference amounts to the difference between war and crime.  The crime of a madman is not an act of the tribe.  Anger and hatred differ in their causes and in their effects, as Aristotle observed.  One can become angry without hating, and hate without being angry.  Between the two, violence is much more likely to arise from anger than from hatred.  Following Aristotle again, hatred merely wishes ill upon the object of  hatred, whereas anger wishes to see ill done to the object of anger.

Tribalism theory fails to account for “white supremacism,” since white is not a tribe, for many tribes are white.  In Europe, there are, or were, tribes of Frenchmen, Germans, Swedes, English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Poles, and Russians – all of which were are war with one another in the past; so white, is not a tribe, and white supremacism is therefore inexplicable within the theory offered.

Tribalism also fails to account for prolonged peace, such as that which exists among the six tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, or among the nations of Europe for the last nearly eighty years.

Islam creates precisely the tribalism Dr. Polgar condemns, yet the purpose of de-tribalizing the rest of us is to end Islamophobia, which can be defined as a fear of the tribal characteristics of the Islamic tribe.

End of observations.

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