Tribalisms and truths

Rob Shields makes the point in his foreword to The Time of the Tribes, by Maffesoli, that aesthesis, in the classical sense, had to do with truth and beauty, or truth and correctness, not in an absolute sense but as defined by collective experience and consensus. It wasn't really news that beauty was a matter of consensus, and subject to shifting and differing community standards. A short walk through any shopping mall with a large population of young people will show that there are all sorts of ways to present oneself or makes oneself presentable, even within a generation. It was rather more surprising to hear that truth and correctness were subject to debate. I felt like Diane Keaton's character, Erica, in Something's Gotta Give, when she complains to Jack Nicholson's character, Harry, that he has deceived her. He answers, "I've always told you some version of the truth." She howls back that "the truth doesn't have versions." But, of course, she is wrong. Armies of spin doctors out there live with that convenient truth every day.

           I think what Shields is getting at is related to something Leslie Marmon Silko says about the role of story in helping build consensus, or maybe it's the ways consensus relates to stories, in traditional Pueblo cultures. Maybe in many such tribal cultures? Story telling has two functions: a) to define and preserve tradition (i.e. to define and reproduce cultural norms), and b) to accommodate change. The Pueblo, Silko explains, "sought a communal truth, not an absolute. For them, truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries" ("Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination").

          Tribalism is no longer a village thing, however, not something set by geography, blood and marriage ties. We do not live in a single, reasonably homogeneous tribalized culture anymore, and have not for rather a long time in urbanized North America (or pretty much anywhere else in the urbanized world). We are in an age predicted by Tesla and given a name by McLuhan. Tesla, in a 1926 interview in Colliers Magazine, predicted: 

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Picking up on something like this idea McLuhan in, Understanding Media (1964): said “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself into a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” And somewhere along the way mentioned the "global village" in an era of tribalism mediated by electronic technology: "...electronic technology creates not the nation but the tribe."

In effect, as I see it, electronic technology creates not the tribe, but multiple tribalisms--a lot of villages one can be part of from one electronic centre, a centre that moves when we do (or when our shirt pocket does--though doctors advise us not to carry those devices so close to our hearts). Maybe even a lot of different kinds of villages. And it creates different ways to belong, electronically.

       What am I saying about "friendships" negotiated through Facebook, if people who are in that tribe (or in a  tribalized group within the bigger world of my Facebook friends) are not something or someone I'm following on my Twitter? And if they are or are not in my "Contacts" list on my cell phone? Or in my e-mail? Or even in the hard copy notebook I carry such information around in? Do my different social media/electronic and non-electronic communications devices, that let me reach out and touch someone, not only connect me with different tribes, based on different loyalties and interests? Do they also create different kinds of tribes through the different ways they mediate the connections?  Am I tribalized different ways by every medium I tribalize through? Even if the same person or persons are members with whom I associate via different media, are my tribal relations different in each case?

        If so, are the truths open to me and the beauty I can be exposed to and levels of correctness I can reach some kind of consensus over, different because of the different webs and socially mediated, electronically programmed conventions through which I seek consensus?

       Somehow the idea of epistemes begins to gnaw at the corners of my curiosity. What are the unexamined norms the different tribalizing media make me party to?