This blog post is about The Ideology Is Not the Movement, a 2016-04-04 blog post by Scott Alexander. I read it only recently because it was linked from Scott Alexander’s viral 2026-01-16 eulogy of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, on which I have nothing to say.
The Ideology Is Not the Movement, or I≠M for short, develops a concept of “tribe” and “tribalism” in order to explain various phenomena of human social groups. I≠M opens by questioning whether the Sunni/Shia divide can really be about whether a given Muslim supports Abu Bakr or Ali for caliph, given that that dispute “was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest.” Scott Alexander proposes that it’s not really about that at all by comparing it to the Robbers’ Cave experiment, where two nearly identical groups of boys became bitter rivals almost immediately. It is clear that those two groups of boys, although they developed different customs and ideas, were not divided fundamentally by their having competing ideologies of “Rattlerism” and “Eagleism”. Scott Alexander’s idea, then, is that Sunnis and Shias are something more like that, and he uses this contrast as the motivation to build up his concept of “tribe”.
Culture
You might expect that I’m about to explain Scott Alexander’s concept of “tribe”, since I just summarized the first section of I≠M. Well, you can read I≠M yourself to see how it develops the concept of “tribe” from then on, but since I have a problem with that development, I will make that problem clear before continuing, so as not to confuse you. The problem is as follows. Scott Alexander confuses two concepts, which I will call culture and community.
- A culture is basically what Scott Alexander calls a “tribe” when he is trying to define it in broad and abstract terms: it is a group of people who share “pre-existing differences” (traits, styles, dispositions, and “undefinable habits of thought”), which are gathered by a particular belief/event/activity which serves as a “rallying flag” for those types of people, which then undergo cultural “development” (of symbols, myths, heroes/villains, jargon, grievances, norms), and which, finally, may experience “dissolution” if the rallying flag somehow stops serving its purpose. Due to the pre-existing differences marked out by cultures, people get along better within-culture than between-cultures, and members of the same culture tend to enjoy the same kinds of cultural products, regardless whether they share any single core set of beliefs or values.
- A community is what is really behind some, but not all, of Scott Alexander’s purported examples of tribes, which therefore do not wholly fit his abstract theory. A community is defined by lack of alternatives, as is often caused by poverty or disaster, but not necessarily; a community must stick together in order to face their harsh conditions together, and this mutual dependency for survival makes it much more important to “fit in” with a community than with a culture. Members of a community will often hide parts of themselves or suppress preferences, because individuality and authenticity are less valuable than continued membership in good standing.
In this blog post, I will consistently use the terms “culture” and “community” as just defined, regardless what word was used for a particular group in other sources. I claim, then, that Scott Alexander’s examples of the gamer culture, the atheist culture, and the LessWrong rationalist culture, are examples of cultures rather than communities. I claim, more broadly, that most cultures are not communities, although some communities have cultures; this will be explained further in the next sections.
By contrast with communities, there is not as much of a clear benefit from “fitting in” with cultures. If you’re an outcast from the Communist Party (in most cases today), you may feel bad about yourself if you respected the other members of the Party, but you can still make it well in broader society; regarding anything that mattered for your survival, you have alternatives.
In my reflections leading up to this post, I had been wondering whether maybe I had never experienced tribalism in the sense Scott Alexander mentions. It turned out that, while I have been in many cultures, I do not find that the cultures I have been in have had the traits of communities, and hence my wonderment was due to the confusion inherent to the tribe concept.
Community
I will now point out which of Scott Alexander’s examples of tribes were clearly communities rather than cultures.
The Robbers’ Cave boys were a community. They were not divided by ideologies, but what united them wasn’t ideology either: they were united by depending on each other for various survival tasks, or rather, mock-survival tasks at their summer camp. Very likely, if you gave each boy plenty of resources so that each could have a nice time on his own, they’d stop caring about each other as much.
A different example of community in I≠M are disability communities, such as the community of deaf people. Deaf people are as diverse as humanity at large; they were not brought together because they had common likes and dislikes, or shared “undefinable habits of thought”. They were brought together because they depended on each other to have access to communication, employment, mutual aid, and social life in a world built for hearing people. They lacked alternatives, and this is what defines a community.
As I said, lack of alternatives is very often produced by harsh conditions such as poverty, disaster, geography, or discrimination, but this is not always the case; for instance, the Amish have voluntarily made some alternatives unavailable to themselves, secluding themselves from the outside world.
Community cultures
Communities often have cultures. The Eagles and the Rattlers developed rudimentary cultures, where “the Eagles developed an image of themselves as proper-and-moral”, while “the Rattlers developed an image of themselves as rough-and-tough”. Although they didn’t rally around anything cultural, it wouldn’t surprise me if deaf people have a unique culture of their own, as well as other disability communities; and of course, the Amish are a community built from a culture, rather than the other way around. (We may call a community built from a culture a “culture community”. I think most so-called “intentional communities” are culture communities.)
That said, I think it’s not true that every community has a unique “community culture”. For instance, the mafia may have many unique values regarding honor and retribution, but I don’t think they necessarily feel better than people outside the mafia, or share a lot of cultural products, or enjoy each other’s company more than outsiders’, or anything; they probably aren’t very different from other Italians regarding what sorts of media they like. Maybe there are flaws with this example of the mafia, but it at least seems plausible to me that we may find many communities that don’t have a unique culture.
Scott Alexander’s example of Sunni and Shia Islam is trickier, since they may have started out as a community with a culture and later become merely a culture, I am not sure. I do not believe that this necessarily weakens the culture; many strong cultures were never communities.
Atomization
Insofar as there is a process which may be called “atomization” in modern society, I think it consists in the fact that people are getting richer and, as a result, do not need communities to survive as much. Since communities are defined by lack of alternatives, they are dissolved when alternatives develop.
Aside from the cases of culture communities such as the Amish and intentional communities, the sacrifice of authenticity and individuality is, usually, a compromise made in order to survive, not something valued for its own sake; most people prefer not to hide parts of their personality in order to better fit in with a group.
So I consider that atomization is a good thing, insofar as it consists in people getting what they prefer.
Many persons are appalled when they hear me saying that atomization is a good thing, and I think the reason this happens is that they are, like Scott Alexander, confusing cultures with communities. Hence, they think atomization is bad because being part of a culture is enjoyable.
However, I have just explained atomization as an effect that affects communities, not cultures; there are many cultures today, and more cultures than ever thanks to the Internet, such as the rationalist culture that Scott Alexander mentions, which formed entirely online. Atomization is the erosion of communities, whereas cultures are not harmed by it, except the few cultures that depend on communities.
While I think it’s good that communities are on the way out, I have nothing against cultures, and I have generally enjoyed being part of cultures, although I do not fit in with any cultures, very much, these days – and notably, this is perfectly fine, since failing to fit in with cultures is not a survival risk, unlike communities.
So the fact that Scott Alexander confused these two concepts into his blurred concept of “tribe” has really helped me clarify them for myself and notice the difficulties with terminology around this topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment