Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Tribe rests on the belief that crisis can flatten the differences in human society. Junger is arguing that modern society is too consumed with things that do not really matter. What really matters is what is important during moments of acute crisis: how we meet our basic survival needs, and how we make each other feel in the process. In crisis, according to Junger, people must pull together in extraordinary ways, and in the process, materialism, racism, elitism, other hang-ups of modern life become less important to people. Junger cites a study of World War II by Charles Fritz, who writes that modern society has disrupted the social bonds that have historically shaped the human experience; disasters, Fritz proposes, essentially pull people back in time:

Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group (53-54).

The crisis moment is fleeting, and thus the leveling effect is too. For Junger, however, the human capacity to pull together is alive and well, even if it seems to be situational. The theme of crisis as a great leveler resonates across the archive of social thought, and Junger mobilizes it to persuade his reading audience towards greater collectivism.

There is, it must be noted, also ample empirical data of crisis amplifying rather than flattening social differences. One example of this is Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. While people did help each other cross-class and cross-race, much of the solidarity expressed was within same-race and same-class groups—in other words, people helping their own. In fact, Katrina was notorious for brazen incidents of racist violence, such as when New Orleanians attempting to cross the Mississippi into the suburb of Gretna in the immediate aftermath of the storm were refused entry by armed Gretna residents and police officers who shot over their heads to turn them around. The regular wildfire season in California is another example, as wealthy people can purchase private fire fighters to protect their homes and then benefit from public subsidies to rebuild their properties when they are destroyed. In short, there is evidence to suggest that crisis can accentuate modern society’s hierarchies as much as it has the potential to level them.