Anyone who follows this blog probably thinks I’m a severe leftists (I swear, I’m not. I just sound like one online.), so if you normally disagree with my politics, well, this might be the post for you.

Why ‘The People Speak’ and the Zinn Education Project May Be Illegal in Public Schools

OK. So… you ever like what somebody’s trying to say and hate the way they’re saying it?

• Education needs serious reform: check!
• History class can (and should) be used as a call to social action: check!
• All history – what we did right as well as what we seriously screwed the pooch on, all the often twisted roads to how we got where we are now – should be taught: check!
• There is no such thing as a non-biased history lesson, so we might as well come right out and say “hey, this is biased”: check!
• Students should be taught to question everything: check!

These are the stated goals of the Zinn project, and I believe with my whole heart that these are incredibly admirable goals. Then I read the lesson plan that’s posted in the article, and while I disagree with nothing in there… well… I guess in my mind there’s such a thing as too biased.

“Unity” – what does that mean? As humans, we are naturally social and we group ourselves.  It’s how we survived as a hunter-gatherer culture whose enemies had better eyesight, bigger claws and thicker skin: we made tribes.

In modern American society, we don’t have the hunter-gatherer collective defending the tribe from panthers, but we have our facsimile standing under the Friday Night Lights watching the local boys defend the home field from the Neighbor HS Panthers. We want a group to root for, to love on, to defend. Take two people who normally wouldn’t say two words to each other, stick ‘em in a stadium, and they’re suddenly wearing similar dress, carrying the same symbols, chanting in unison, and then moshing in the same pit when a field goal sneaks through the uprights to win the game.

We do the same thing with countries that we do with high school football teams: we have symbols and pennants, colors and mottoes, and these things are used to promote tribe unity… and here’s where the idealogical divide seems to split apart, because the same things that are used to promote unity in the form of pride and loyalty (what conservatives typically emphasize, and two things I think are great) are also used to promote conformity and what I’ll call a tribal psychopathy (what liberals tend to emphasize, and two things that I have a huge problem with – and I’ll get to what I mean by tribal psychopathy in a minute).

I will stand by pride and loyalty as good things, provided they don’t swing to an extreme. Pride gives us the confidence to challenge ourselves and dare things that we otherwise wouldn’t. (“We’re going to contest and we’re taking on the bigger, richer schools of Houston – and we’re going to look GOOD doing it! ‘Cause we’re MHS Theater, and we’re awesome!”) And loyalty makes us give people a second chance when they screw up – and we all will screw up. We need loyalty.

On the other side…

Conformity is a mistreatment of members of your own tribe, and I don’t think I need to proselytize on why required (or even encouraged) group-think is bad anywhere outside of a mammoth-hunting party, a sports stadium, or a group artistic endeavor (good actors and techies know that the good of the play is more important than the good of the single performer – you don’t suddenly decide to do your own thing on opening night, no matter how good your idea is).  (Just like pride and loyalty can have their bad sides, conformity, used judiciously and thoughtfully, as much as it pains me to say, does have a good side).

So what is tribal psychopathy?

A psychopath is someone who is incapable of feeling empathy for other people or remorse for their actions against them. According to an article in the New Yorker, pyschopathy could affect up to 1% of American men (women are much less likely to utterly lack empathy… go figure), so it’s much more prevalent than people think and doesn’t usually result in serial killers. It does result in that ass who doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as he gets what he wants. Problem is, with a psychopath, this guy’s not ignoring the feelings of others or somehow squashing his guilt, like most of us tend to assume… it never occurred to his brain to have those feelings. Psychopaths will sometimes seek out useful people to make “friends” with, but when it comes down to it, their tribes only ever have one person in it.

For the rest of us, though, somewhere along the way of developing our natural tribe mentality, we realize that if there is an “us”, then there must be a “them.” And those other tribes are competing with us for the world’s limited resources, like good hunting grounds… and oil. (And while there might be enough to go around for now, our children’s children’s children are going to have a problem, so we should be forward thinking and start staking claims to provide for our children’s futures.) And while, again, it’s very natural to look out for your own tribe, a tribal psychopath is someone who, while likely caring and loyal to people within his/her tribe, feels no empathy towards any other tribes and no guilt for any actions performed against them.

I think tribal psychopathy is not only a lot more common than regular psychopathy (and if you know 100 men, according to some psychologists, you know a psychopath. As a schoolteacher who averaged 100 new students per year, every two years, I taught a psychopath. So…. it wasn’t me! It was them!) but tribal psychopathy is, to an extent at least, socially accepted. Certainly a lot more accepted than the Tribe Me form of psychopathy.

So… back to the article that you probably forgot about since I haven’t mentioned it in ten years… it seems to me, that Zinn is trying to get rid of tribal psychopathy (which is a bad thing that we should get rid of) by getting rid of tribalism. “Imagine all the people, living life as one…” and all that.

I don’t think it’s going to work. I think rejecting tribe goes against the core of human nature, because everyone but psychopaths have a tribe. (Showtime even gave Dexter tribal vestiges so audiences would like him. Imagine Dexter without his confusion over his wife, father, sister, and adopted kids. Yeah. Suddenly he ain’t so cool.) Some people might say they have no tribe, but if you study them, they’ve redirected their tribal loyalties onto an idealogical clique. For example, “I’m an artist/scientist/member of ‘x’ religious group/etc., not beholden to country but to mankind… and my fellow artists/scientists/members of ‘x’ religious group/etc.” Surprisingly, I sometimes find ideological tribes to be the most hateful of others because they (a) often don’t realize that’s a tribe, (b) justify rejecting people whose tribes are anything but ideological in nature as unenlightened or uneducated, and (c) can get the hate on in a spectacular fashion for tribes who are ideologically not aligned with their own – a difference in geography is nothing compared to a difference of opinion on gun control. My favorite true life quote ever of this type was, “I hate Republicans because Republicans hate people.” Seriously? Would you listen to what you just said?

Anyway, everyone has a tribe – probably multiple tribes – and it isn’t all of humanity.  Tribalism is an inherent part of human nature. Tribal psychopathy, however, isn’t inherent to all humanity – a lot of people love their tribe without forgetting the sovereignty and potential efficacy of other tribes – which means we can combat tribal psychopathy. But we need to work with human nature instead of trying to change human nature. Don’t tell people not to group; you’ll fail. Make it not acceptable inside your group to hate other groups. That I’ve seen be successful. Wave that flag… and make sure it stands for something worthwhile. That’s the way to a better humanity.