Better Living through Software

Jon Udell talks about being an evangelist, and opines that tribalism may have evolutionary roots, but is more trouble than it’s worth today.

Robin Dunbar and Matt Ridley both have books that discuss theories on the evolutionary roots of tribalism.  Once you get beyond the size of a clan (the natural size of population of all living descendants of an elderly matriarch), social cooperation can no longer be managed in the wetware structures of an individual’s brain.  So to enable larger groups, we have various psychological traits which promote “groupishness”.  Groupishness is required for large-scale social cooperation, but is a catalyst for all sorts of evil that individuals alone would never perpetrate.  Milgram’s “electrocute a stranger” experiment relied on tribe-enabling conformity and authority responses.  And the literature is full of examples of stupid outcomes from “groupthink”.

But there is another reason.  George Soros would say that most “isms” are bad, because they start out as tools but eventually become slave-masters.  Communism, Capitalism, etc.  Eventually the orthodoxy of “capitalism” becomes more important to people than the actual needs that brought the ideas to light.  People form tribes around the orthodox interpretations of the idea and become increasingly divorced from reality.  People get mesmerized by the symbol and lose the signified.  That’s a human flaw that doesn’t rely on groupishness, it relies on laziness and lack of vigilance.

~

 The opening of Gang Starr’s “Robin Hood Theory” has a nice little passage about “isms”:

And no matter what we say our religion is
Whether it’s Islam, Christianity
Juda-ism, Buddha-ism, old school-ism or new school-ism
If we’re not schooling the youth with wisdom…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Life at Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.