tribalism

Tribalism is the First Men’s recurring submission to national and racial allegiance at the expense of broader human solidarity. It is not merely patriotic feeling: the narrative presents it as an impulse that can survive cosmopolitan convictions, pacifist policies, and institutions built to prevent war, then reappear in moments of fear or conflict. Its significance lies in this contradiction. Peoples may recognize a common human interest and work toward unity, yet remain vulnerable to loyalties that divide them into rival camps.

Origins and the First World Conflict

The European War, known at the time as the War to End War, provides an early demonstration of tribalism’s force and ambiguity. The conflict arose from entangled motives, including a real difference in temperament between France and Germany, rivalry between Germany and England, and brutal gestures by the German government and military command. Yet the opposing sides could not be distinguished by a clear difference of principle. Each believed itself to defend civilization; both committed acts of brutality, and both also showed heroism and unusual generosity. Tribal loyalties thus did not eliminate moral conduct, but made self-justifying allegiance compatible with conduct that contradicted the values each side claimed to represent.

The war also produced a genuine desire for peace and a united world. That impulse briefly rose above tribal division, but lacked the clarity and confidence needed to become a durable policy. The peace that followed therefore embodies both an emerging human loyalty and the persistence of national attachment. The narrative treats the combination as a defining weakness of the First Men: the aspiration toward wider solidarity was real, but remained too fragile to displace the habits of division.

A later accident exposes how precarious that balance was. After a peace message had been sent, a French airman lost his way through miscalculation or an instrument defect and came to grief in London. The resulting destruction of England and France, the narrative argues, might have been avoided had the war been stopped at its outset. Without the accident, the movement begun by England’s peace message might have advanced toward human unification before the mental deterioration that followed repeated wars. The episode makes tribalism’s consequences appear neither wholly inevitable nor safely overcome: a small contingency could decide whether the peace impulse gained strength or was overwhelmed by another catastrophe.

Cosmopolitan Allegiance and the Return of Distrust

The distinction between tribalists and cosmopolitans cuts across national borders. In every country, a minority increasingly understood its allegiance as being to humanity or to the human spirit, rather than simply to a nation. Yet this cosmopolitan outlook remained entangled with national prejudice and political faction. Some people identified the defense of humanity with the defense of their own country as the supposed home of enlightenment; social injustice could also turn class loyalty into a militant allegiance that drew both supporters and opponents into sectarian feeling. A broader identity had begun to emerge, but older divisions could shape how it was understood and defended.

The Anglo-French War renewed the desire for peace while making peace less secure. Distrust expanded beyond the old suspicion between nations into fear of human nature itself: people who thought of themselves as committed Europeans worried that they might be swept into another episode of irrational patriotism. The European Confederacy was formed partly in response. All European nations except Russia surrendered sovereignty to a common authority and pooled their armaments. The stated purpose was peace, but the United States interpreted the arrangement as directed against it and withdrew from the League of Nations, while China remained in the League in the hope of using it against its rival.

The Confederacy looked unified from outside but proved insecure under pressure. Its divisions surfaced in serious crises, and minor wars accumulated economic and psychological damage. Europe eventually acquired something like a shared national sentiment, but the account stresses that common fear of the United States did more to produce this unity than common human loyalty. Tribalism could therefore change scale without disappearing: a collection of older national divisions might be gathered into a larger bloc, still defined by opposition to another power.

Rival Powers and the Failure of Institutions

The League of Nations offered a concrete focus for loyalty to humanity, and gradually gained enough moral authority that even powerful states hesitated to reject its findings openly. It also helped prevent many minor conflicts. But it could not prevent the major wars, when national loyalties overcame pledges and nations plunged into fear-inspired aggression. The Anglo-French War arose from one such loss of control; the Russo-German War became possible when the United States favored Russia and China favored Germany. After Europe’s destruction, the League stood for a time against the United States, but its domination by China meant that it no longer represented cosmopolitanism in the same way. Humanitarians worked to bring the United States back into the fold, eventually succeeding.

The rivalry between Russia and Germany shows how tribal antagonism could be redirected by material dependence and political self-deception. Russia’s industrial system increasingly relied on United States capital and organization, even as German capitalism became the symbol against which Russian communism defined itself. Resentment toward Germany displaced hostility that might otherwise have been directed at the United States, whose wealth Russia needed. The Germans, meanwhile, resented being driven from profitable enterprise in Russia, especially the exploitation of Russian Asian oil. As dwindling oil supplies made control of fuel a source of political competition, economic pressures strengthened the conditions in which national antagonism could become war.

In the later contest between the United States and China, the pattern widened into a struggle between two powerful cultural and political loyalties. The United States claimed a planetary role and exerted influence through its products, capital, and mass media; China preserved a distinct culture while developing its industries and political organization. After Europe’s eclipse, other allegiances gradually became local variants of either an American or a Chinese sentiment. The League itself eventually split into two organizations, each claiming universal authority but dominated by one of the rival supernational loyalties. The aspiration to a common political order survived, but its institutions were divided by the very tribal force they were meant to contain.

Peace, Instinct, and Historical Consequence

Long periods of peace did not remove tribalism. After the Euro-American War, a century of smaller conflicts was followed by strained peace between the United States and China. Most people were consciously internationalist and pacifist, and big business was contemptuous of patriotism; nevertheless, inherited tribal feeling remained ready to take possession of individual minds. The account locates the danger partly in a mismatch between social conditions and human dispositions. Improved security and prolonged peace had reduced the ordinary hardships and dangers of life, but supplied no harmless substitute for war as an outlet for the combative instincts of creatures shaped for life in the wild. People wanted peace consciously while remaining susceptible to the adventurous and combative appeal associated with war.

This account makes tribalism more than a political doctrine or the product of a particular dispute. It is a recurrent vulnerability: an impulse that can seize people despite their considered beliefs, and that transforms fear, economic rivalry, or the desire for adventure into collective aggression. The eventual degradation after the First World State’s fall reinforces the larger warning about the limits of the First Men. A vast epidemic of insanity and declining intelligence prevented them from checking the collapse in its earliest stage; afterward, disillusion, fatigue, and the majority’s inability to devote themselves wholeheartedly impeded reconstruction. The history does not attribute every breakdown to tribalism alone, but repeatedly shows how societies that cannot govern private and collective impulses are poorly equipped to preserve a shared order.

Later Forms of Collective Life

The account’s much later societies provide a contrast, not a simple political cure. The Second Men sought a community in which each individual could apprehend the experience of others directly; the ideal was difficult to attain, and the longing for spiritual union left a persistent fear of loneliness. Their sexual customs reflected this emphasis on intimacy between minds: casual relations were distinguished from relations expressing deeper union, and a psychological technique could either facilitate or prevent conception. Here, collective connection is imagined as an enlargement of mutual understanding rather than allegiance against an external people.

In the later group society described by the narrator, sexual groups are organized around close intimacy, temperamental harmony, and complementariness, conditions considered necessary for higher experience. A group of ninety-six members may gradually replace every individual and still remain the same super-individual mind, enriched by newcomers’ memories. Members retain a special loyalty to the group, while relationships within it vary: some live together, and some form long-lasting partnerships; even those partnerships are periodically renewed through relations with other group members to maintain the group-mind. These arrangements do not establish that collective loyalty has vanished. They do, however, place it in a different frame from the First Men’s tribal conflicts: belonging is organized as intimate participation in a continuing shared mind, not as a national camp’s antagonism toward another. Across this contrast, tribalism marks the historical cost of solidarity narrowed into rivalry.