Latest examples of tribal thinking, as many of my posts over the past months and years have compiled, clarified by my reading of Joshua Greene’s book and many others.
- Short items about indoctrination in Florida schools (“get them while they’re young”) and Kari Lake’s incoherent take on abortion;
- Robert Reich on how the Republican Party has given up any pretense about caring about right or wrong (that is, it’s all about tribalism);
- Short items about MTG’s idea to use space lasers to kill migrants, and her boyfriend’s surprise that NYC is not the apocalyptic nightmare that right-wing news says it is; about blaming homelessness on sin; about how crime data must be due to the Biden administration “cooking the books”; how Republicans are not only happy with child labor, but repeals child labor lunch breaks; Kari Lake advocating “Glock” violence; and a GOP candidate blaming LGBTQ+ advocates on demons;
- A long piece in LA Times about how the precedent for Arizona’s abortion ban is taken out of context from 19th century history, when the concern was about the poisoning of women; and how appealing to originalism is invalid.
After two days of a book review (of a book about tribal morality and the idea of “deep pragmatism” to solve inter-tribal problems), here’s another batch of items from the news that illustrate tribal morality. I admit it’s difficult sometimes to tell the difference between tribal morality and sheer stupidity.
Joe.My.God, 19 Apr 2024: New FL Law Lets “Patriotic” Groups Recruit In Schools
They’re fine with indoctrination as long as it’s their tribe’s story.
And this:
Joe.My.God: DeSantis Signs GOP Bill Mandating “Anti-Communist Education” In Public Schools Starting In Kindergarten
Here’s an example. This has always been the Catholic Church’s mantra:
The Guardian 29 May 2011: Get them while they’re young
If religious people of all stripes truly believed in the truth of their faith, they’d allow children to reach adulthood before exposing them to religion so they could make their own decision about what (if anything) to believe.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 18 Apr 2024: “You can go three hours that way”: Kari Lake and Arizona GOP can’t decide if abortion is bad or not, subtitled “Republicans in the state legislature can’t seem to commit to a stance on abortion publicly”
They know they’re against it, because babies, but they’re not smart enough to think through the implications and to be consistent.
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Robert Reich, 18 Apr 2024: The Party’s Over (also at Alternet as The death of the Republican Party is a tragedy)
Gist: Republicans have abandoned any pretense of caring about right and wrong. It’s about the tribe: Sununu, confronted with all of Trump’s crimes: “For me, it’s not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration.”
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Joe.My.God, 18 Apr 2024: MTG Bill Would Fund “Space Lasers” To Stop Migrants
Is she mocking herself (for comments a couple years ago in which she said fires in northern California were started by “Jewish Space Lasers”)? Or is she advocating deadly force against outsiders?
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Joe.My.God, 17 Apr 2024: MTG’s Boyfriend Is Disappointed NYC Isn’t “Chaotic”
He’s disappointed that New York City isn’t as apocalyptic as he’d heard. He believes his side’s own propaganda! Also, this is the boyfriend who said the solar eclipse was a warning from God. These people tend to be religious in a deeply superstitious sense.
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Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 18 Apr 2024: Wisconsin official blames homelessness on “sin,” then votes against aid for the poor, subtitled “Jeff Weigand, a conservative Christian, said before his vote that sin was the ‘root cause’ of homelessness”
Nonsense. Superstition again. There are plenty of studies about how and why people become homeless, about which he knows nothing. (You can blame *anything* on sin.)
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Media Matters, 17 Apr 2024: Right-wing media falsely claim FBI, Biden administration are “cooking the books” on crime data
Subtitled: “Fox host Greg Gutfeld cited a report published in the Washington Examiner to falsely claim that recent FBI crime data is a ‘lie’ and that Democrats ‘bribed the FBI to publish this'”
Evidence, please? They have none. The tribal mentality, so distrusting of actual evidence that would contradict their mythology and ideology, assigns everything they don’t want to accept as a conspiracy.
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Joe.My.God, 18 Apr 2024: Louisiana Panel Repeals Lunch Breaks For Child Workers
They’re fine with child labor. And — don’t give them lunch. Are they trying to recreate the world of Charles Dickens’ England? At least Oliver Twist was able to ask, “Please, sir, may I have some more?”
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The New Republic, 18 Apr 2024: Kari Lake’s Vile New Threat of “Glock” Violence Exposes MAGA’s Lunacy
Subtitle: With Lake urging supporters to “strap on a Glock,” we talked to a counterterrorism official during the Trump presidency about how political violence went mainstream in the MAGA movement.”
Apparently Republicans cannot reason their way into winning elections, so they threaten violence.
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LGBTQNation, 17 Apr 2024: GOP candidate compares LGBTQ+ activists to Hitler & says demons are turning kids trans
Subtitled: Drenda Keesee is running unopposed in Ohio and has dedicated her career as a pastor to “protecting” kids from liberals trying to “brainwash” them.
Again, conservatives are fine with certain kinds of indoctrination, and perceive exposure to any contrary ideas as “brainwashing”. (Is that term still a thing? Or is it a holdover from 1960s Cold War conspiracy theories? The Manchurian Candidate.) And of course there’s a thread of deeply superstitious thinking here, about demons and what God intends. And fear.
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Here’s a longer piece that I will quote from.
LA Times, Kevin Waite, 18 Apr 2024: Opinion: Is Arizona’s abortion ban a return to the 19th century? No, it’s actually worse
The piece keys off recent events in Arizona.
Arizona’s Supreme Court opened a new front in the war on women’s reproductive rights last week when it resurrected an obscure 1864 law that bans abortion in almost all cases. Critics of the ruling say the court has thrown Arizona back into the 19th century.
That isn’t entirely fair to the 19th century.
The irony of last week’s reactionary ruling is that the author of the original law, William T. Howell, was a progressive by the standards of his time. The politics of Arizona’s current justices bear little resemblance to the 19th century antecedent upon whom their ruling relies.
The article summarizes the history of the Civil War, and an early battle in which migrants from Texas seized power in southern New Mexico and established a new rebel territory, “Arizona.” Union troops defeated them; Congress split the region into Arizona and New Mexico (which only much later became states). A legislator from Michigan, William T. Howell, wrote a new code of laws for Arizona, with a primary purpose of ensuring that slavery would never take root in Arizona. He copied some of it, including the abortion ban, from California’s legal code.
From the colonial era into the early 19th century, abortions had been commonly administered and rarely criminalized. Benjamin Franklin even included a recipe for an abortifacient in a math textbook, of all places. Abortions before “quickening” — within roughly the first four or five months of pregnancy — were considered “the purview of women” rather than the law, according to the historian Sarah Handley-Cousins. Even the Catholic Church “implicitly accepted” abortions before quickening, the historian Leslie J. Reagan has noted.
The Howell Code, then, marked a departure from a more permissive approach to abortion. Even so, the antiabortion laws of the mid-19th century were generally born of a sincere concern for women’s health that is absent from today’s legislation. Tellingly, Arizona’s original antiabortion clause appeared within a provision on poisoning. The underlying premise was that abortions posed health risks to women, who were seen as victims and not held legally liable for the medical procedures performed on them.
So: Howell’s abortion provision was written out of concern for women’s health. The piece concludes:
Howell is no progressive poster child by today’s standards. He was in many ways a man of his time. And his code, written hastily in his provisional courtroom — an adobe shack adjoining a horse corral — reflected some of the prevailing prejudices of the early American frontier, imposing numerous restrictions on people who weren’t white.
But Howell is nevertheless an awkward antecedent for today’s antiabortion movement. If Arizona’s 21st century Supreme Court justices wish to exhume an obscure 19th century predecessor from the recesses of history, that’s their prerogative. But they should understand that even he is misaligned with their extreme politics.
This is the peril of textualism, or originalism, taking the letter of the law, or the constitution, no matter how many years old, literally, yet out of the context in which it was written. And, more broadly, thinking that laws written so long ago based on understanding in their day are forever valid.
Context matters. Circumstances change. Knowledge expands. As with recent discussions of morality: laws written centuries ago are not necessarily applicable today. Tribal conservatives think that everything cemented in the past are forever true. That’s simplistic thinking, and untrue.
