Creed as a Proxy for Blood
We Can’t Escape Tribalism Even When We Try
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In 2006, at the height of radical Islam, the RAND Corporation published an article entitled Today’s Wars Are Less About Ideas Than Extreme Tribalism. [1] If they had simply removed the word “today’s”, this would have been far more truthful, but then, liberalism can’t admit that ideas aren’t in the driver’s seat. No propositional identity can—saying the quiet part out loud robs it of its power.
All throughout history, men have died for ideas. But in the final analysis, those ideas that men have died for have only ever been proxies for blood, and when they cease to be that is when men cease to find them worth dying over. Universalism has triumphed over tribalism, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory—tribalism has always had the last laugh.
In several articles we’ve discussed Universal Darwinism, the fact that ideas are subject to natural selection like anything else, that they “live their own lives” and have their own interests. Ideas need hosts, agents who hold them, and the interests of the ideas are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the host. Some ideas propagate at the expense of the host; we’ve called this viral propagation. Some ideas propagate only when the host does; we’ve called this organic propagation. These ideas that serve organic purposes promote group distinction and solidarity. Even a universalistic creed can do that—for a time. Ibn Khaldun was aware of this, which is what he had in mind when he said “group feeling results only from blood relationship or something corresponding to it.” [2]
Christianity once provided such a group feeling, a sense of distinction from the outsider. This may come as a surprise to folkish pagans, who see Christianity through the lens of universalism and propositionality, and as antithetical to ethnic distinction. In practice, Christianity has absolutely been a proxy for ethnicity, and it continues to be to this day in a much-attenuated form.
The Christians who most strongly identify as Christian in the West today are Catholics. This is not due to Catholicism’s doctrine, but is rather the result of its steady loss of ground for centuries: Catholicism is a minority religion in the West, and that means it’s a good ethnic marker. Ethnic Celts, for example, tend to identify quite strongly as Catholic. Whether in French Canada, Ireland, or to a lesser (but still noticeable) extent, Australia, being Catholic is part and parcel of national identity. The creed does not really matter to the ferocity of belief—the creed could be, and historically was, radically different, with the same result. [3] If you look to Eastern Europe, you will find the same effect, for the same reason, in Orthodoxy—but yet stronger because of being even more of a global minority. The reasons offered for the belief vary; the ultimate reason is that being Catholic or Orthodox today is a proxy for ethnicity.
Even more surprising, liberalism has an ethnic dimension. It’s well understood that political beliefs are heritable, [4] and this is no different in the aggregate than it is within families. If you spend any time around upper-class liberals, it becomes clear that their antipathy toward conservatism is as much a matter of belief as it is a gut-level revulsion toward “those people, over there”. As is well-known, most wealthy liberals spend very little time around people of colour, and their beliefs keep them away from country bumpkins, who are ethnically distinct from them generally, [5] so liberalism ends up being a moderately effective ethnic barrier. If musical taste can be a proxy for ethnicity, [6] then surely political beliefs are, including liberalism.
There is a long history of tribal proxy wars through ideology. We could point to the Sunni vs. Shia disputes, which map on to Arab vs. Iranic; think of the Christian Serbs vs. Muslim Kosovars, a straightforwardly tribal dispute with only a thin veneer of religious disagreement; think of Mahayana vs. Theravada Buddhism, which maps on to Northeastern vs. Southeastern Asians; think of Vaishnavism vs. Shaivism, which breaks down along Aryan vs. Dravidian lines. The list is virtually endless. It would be absurd to think that in all these theological disputes the beliefs have given rise to the ethnogenesis rather than that the theology [7] is an expression of and marker for ethnicity.
This would seem to fly in the face of our thesis about universalism propagating virally, that is, either indifferently to or even at the expense of the host. If universalist theologies can promote asabiyyah, doesn’t this mean they’re organic, i.e. they serve the interests of the believer? As an ethnic marker, they can indeed serve the host’s interests, but this can never last, and the degree to which the universalism succeeds in its universality is the degree to which it becomes a poor ethnic marker, and thus indifferent or even hostile to the host. There is a cycle to all this:
- The religion of a people is coextensive with its folkhood. To be a Muslim just means to be an Arab.
- If the religion is adaptive, the people will dominate, and both the people and the religion spread. If the religion is universalist, it spreads faster than the people.
- Eventually, the universalist religion gets “too big” to be an ethnic marker and confer an ethnic advantage. To be a Muslim no longer means to be an Arab.
At this point, one of two things will happen.
The first is that the religion could become sectarian. This is not a degeneration or a step backward, but actually a step forward. The “point” of the religion, at least from an evolutionary perspective, was to confer an adaptive advantage on the host, but as the religion’s viral propagation spilled beyond ethnic bounds, this advantage was lost. It is at that point that the religion typically becomes maladaptive, just as it is fulfilling its mandate of universality. Splitting into sects allows it to serve as an ethnic marker once again, thereby recovering its adaptive advantage. This is what happened in the case of Christianity. People make fun of the thousand-and-one Protestant sects, meanwhile Protestantism has been far and away the most powerful branch of Christianity in 500 years and almost every dominant people has been Protestant.
The second thing that can happen is that the religion can fail to balkanize and never recover its adaptive advantage—at some point it is conquered by a people bearing a tribal religion or a pseudo-tribalism (i.e. one of the sects mentioned above). This is what happened in the case of Islam, twice. First, it was conquered by the Mongols, its cultural flowering cut short and never recovering. Second, it was conquered by Protestant Christendom in the form of the British Empire. In the heyday of Hitchens and Dawkins Islam looked set to conquer the world but we now know this was premature. [8] Interestingly, liberalism (as an extension of Puritanism) is now in the same position as Islam at its height—as a universalist religion bent on global domination. And once again a tribal religion, or at least an ideology—the radical right—is handing it Ls. [9]
Look at the history of Christian wars, and on the surface it looks like a lot of fighting over Bible autism. Look a little deeper and you will find that the Bible had nothing to do with it, and that the real driver was power relations—look still deeper and you will simply see a constellation of tribal wars. The rest of the world looks at European history this way, only Europe tells itself a bedtime story about the war over “ideals”. Only under the veil of Axial philosophy and theology could such a thing be tenable, instead of war being nakedly what it is. Do you think Harold Godwinson, Harald Hardrada, or William the Bastard were, at the end of the day, motivated by legitimating principle? The answer will tell me whether you’re a serious person or no.
Since the advent of propositional religion, power struggles have mostly been proxy wars over “principles” rather than tribal and genetic interests. Ideology is not just a pointless layer on top of reality, it serves an important purpose. Waging war on behalf of principle allows you to a) centralize power by invoking the principle of civic nationalism (“community of believers” vs. infidels) and b) universalize your own interests to demoralize the enemy—a kind of early version of 5GW where you convince the enemy that he is fighting against natural law. Waging this kind of war of ideology is incredibly effective, but also has the effect of runaway liberalism, where conflict must be waged over universal principle, thereby dissolving the boundaries between folkhoods. It also explains why Machiavelli’s foxes tend to prevail and why his lions are seen as oafish and stupid—they don’t get it. It’s also why the plainspoken magician-king type is so utterly corrosive to liberalism: he short circuits its basic power-seeking algorithm. When Hitler just wanted to talk sense to England in the plain manner of a German folkmoot, something was lost in translation.
Epistemic “communities of belief” have always been fake and inorganic, uniting what should be discrete. Because they aim at truth, the community they create can only ever be humanity as a whole. This is obviously not workable, and organic (i.e. ethnic, racial) communities re-assert themselves, usually by balkanizing along epistemic lines at first. “I am an Anglican” becomes a proxy for “I am an Englishman”; “I am a royalist” becomes a proxy for “I am of Frankish and not Gallic stock”. The community of belief is only ever epiphenomenal, parasitical upon organic communities, whatever its pretensions to universality. This is, in a nutshell, why universalism is doomed to failure, and is the basic cycle you see since propositional identity was born in the Axial Age.
Ideology, theology, and principle are all one thing which is gay and Axial. This is the highest rung of Wittgenstein’s ladder.
[1] https://www.rand.org/blog/2006/03/todays-wars-are-less-about-ideas-than-extreme-tribalism.html
[2] Muqaddimah, ch. II, §8. Emphasis added.
[3] For a great overview of how little popular religious expressions have changed for thousands of years, see Claude Lecouteux’s The Tradition of Household Spirits.
[4] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=poliscifacpub
[5] See David Hacket Fisher’s Albion’s Seed for a thorough account of the different ethnic backgrounds of various American centres.
[6] https://phys.org/news/2022-05-sociological-genes-significant-role-cultural.html
[7] Theology will be used in this article in a restricted sense—the rationalization, intellectualization, and especially the universalization of divine things. Just talking about the divine is not “theology”.
[8] We’ll have a book out in a few months explaining why.
[9] Properly understood, the radical right isn’t really an ideology. It’s just tribalism.
IMPERIUM PRESS
OCT 3, 2023
