Localism Against Tribalism

On Sunday mornings I play the organ at St. John’s Episcopal Church. At St. John’s, they’re welcoming and affirming and all the rest. Their big thing is “kindness.” Every year they devote a whole month to being kind. The priest is a woman.

On Thursday evenings I take our oldest son to Awana Club at Arbor Oaks Bible Chapel. At Arbor Oaks they think marriage is for men and women, and that men can’t become women. They have lay elders instead of priests. At the Sunday morning service, only men are allowed to address the congregation.

On Tuesdays my wife Elisa takes the kids to “Adventure Club.” Every week, whatever the weather, 5-10 families spend all day exploring a different state park. Elisa started Adventure Club a few years ago. The people who come run the gamut, from a pastor’s wife to an astrologer.

On weekdays, I teach at one of the local colleges, where my office sits in the middle of a hallway. On my left are the economists. There’s a bad Catholic who mostly believes in free markets and a couple who grew up in communist Romania and really believe in free markets. On my right there’s a historian who writes about racism and a philosopher who started our local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Around Christmastime I took the boys to the city orchestra’s holiday concert. The pianist was our son’s piano teacher. The director of the children’s choir was the cantor at St. John’s. In the audience were not a few of my colleagues, including the theologian who grew up in an intentional Christian community and the aforementioned Romanian economists, whose memories of communism might make them a little suspicious of “intentional communities.”

All this mixing is pretty normal in our town. When I’m out and about, I’m always running into friends and acquaintances who are all interestingly different from each other. Of course if you put them all into a room and told them to talk politics or religion, “interesting” might not be the right word for what would happen. But everybody’s neighborly, and it doesn’t feel false or strained.

Sometimes I think Dubuque might be a bit special. I grew up in or around another midwestern city of a similar size (about 60,000), but the social connections there never felt so dense. It’s also possible that I’m the weird one. I’m pretty intellectually promiscuous. Maybe my circle is more diverse than the circles of the people in my circle, and none of them would recognize what I’m talking about. But even if one or both of those things is true, I don’t think it can be the whole story.

We moved here from Boston. Before Boston we lived in Portland (Oregon). Before that it was Seoul, South Korea, and before that it was Toronto. I grew up on a family farm in Indiana, but I’ve spent a lot of my life in big cities, many of them among the vaunted “global” cities that get celebrated in The Economist. Never in any of those places did I encounter so many meaningfully different points of view as I encounter here in this decidedly non-global town. Different views were all around me, I’m sure. But I didn’t encounter them. It was like the ocean and the thirsty man. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. In the global cities, I was practically swimming in “diversity.” If I wanted to know just how much diversity there was, I could look up the stats and congratulate myself for floating around serenely in the middle of it all. But it wasn’t easy to do anything besides know about it. So it mostly stayed an “it”—a fact, an abstraction, a non-thing that was “out there” to be known. In Dubuque, where life is smaller, “it” is more often flesh and blood. All those people I’m always running into have names that I know, and they know mine. Here, diversity is something I can actually taste.

I’m not about to say that people in small places are necessarily better at “real diversity” than people in big places. Maybe if I didn’t encounter what was there in those global cities, that’s on me, not on the cities. Partly this must be true. When I look back on how I lived then, I see plenty of missed opportunities to connect. And when I look at people I know now who still live in big places, I see many of them doing a better job than I did of building a complex social life that crosses all kinds of lines. Nor do I regret the time I spent in those places, even if my older self knows what my younger self might have done differently. Adventuring and exploring are good things. And there are lots of good things that can only exist when enough people come together in one place. The Dubuque Symphony Orchestra is great, but it can’t perform Mahler’s 8th.

But the dominant prejudice goes in the opposite direction, and what I do want to say is that it’s just that: a prejudice. We’ve been taught by a lot of our stories to imagine small places as homogenizers. A lot of us have in our heads a black-and-white film-set diner where the locals are eternally turning en masse to stare silently at the stranger who disturbs their regular morning argument about the new traffic light on main street. H. L. Mencken is doing a voice-over narration, which is very funny and makes us feel very good about not being interested in traffic lights. There are lots of zingers about “yokels” and “morons,” and at some point he quotes Marx about “rural idiocy” while saliva drops from the open mouths of the badly dressed white men at the counter.

When the dominant prejudice is challenged, the challenger is often an equally reductive counter-image of small-town coziness in which there are no strangers because everybody knows your name. The Mencken idea is that small places are soul-crushingly boring because nobody’s allowed to be different. The anti-Mencken idea is that small places are nurturing and protective because nobody’s being pressured to stand out. It’s never a very satisfying debate because it’s just a contest between competing generalities. The winner gets to determine the emotional valence that gets instinctively attached to a caricature of a reality far richer and more complicated.

A better conversation would counter the dominant prejudice against small places with an emphasis on just how different people in small places can be from one another. I don’t mean this in the usual sense, which is that every single person is the center of an unrepeatable story, and it’s just a question of whether you’re attentive enough to notice what makes us all unique. That’s true enough, but it’s the sort of high-brow cliche that novelists like to trot out when they’re trying to explain why everybody should read novels. I happen to agree that everybody should read novels, and that this is one of the reasons. If you read widely enough, you learn that when you know how to look at it, the life of a contented housewife in Peoria becomes just as compelling as the life of a striving artist in New York. But that way of defending small town life from big city prejudice can give too much ground to the prejudice, and too much credit to the novelist. It argues that under the surface there’s diversity in small places, and that you’ll see it if your vision is sharp enough. The stronger argument is that there’s actually plenty of diversity on the surface, and that it takes wilful blindness to overlook it.

That’s the point of those examples I opened with. None of the differences between the people I mention are hard to parse. It’s simple, big-picture stuff, the kinds of social cleavages and ideological divides that sort people into camps and parties and keep the demographers busy shoveling fresh statistics to the talking heads. You can easily predict who most people at St. John’s voted for, and who most people at Arbor Oaks voted for, without knowing them as individuals. Certainly it’s better to know people as individuals, and I’m not entirely convinced that demography isn’t of the devil. But tribes are real, and as long as they are, it helps to realize that small places can contain multitudes as well as any global city.

Or maybe they can contain them even better. In its more negative sense, “tribal” is a pretty good word for what seems to be unfolding now on the grander stage of the nation and its bigger cities. I don’t know what recently happened in Minneapolis, for example. But when the stage is this big, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is which tribe I trust to tell me what happened in a city I’ve never visited. And I trust the tribe I want to win. I don’t want them to win because I trust them; I trust them because I want them to win. My trust is a political resource I want them to have. Because they’re my tribe. That’s it.

That’s tribalism. Not the fact that tribes exist, but the relentless reduction of every question about “the facts” to one that can be answered by that fact. And the truly countercultural claim is that this reduction is something that happens more easily when the scale of political life is big than when it’s small.

Part of the Mencken story about local life is that tribalism flourishes when people don’t have enough contact with members of other tribes, and that this cross-tribal contact is harder to experience in small places than in big ones. The best response isn’t to accept the premise but then to insist that in small places it’s easier to get to know people more deeply, as individuals. That’s probably not even true. If your aim is to connect on that level, then by definition you should be able to do it in a big place as well as in a small place, since people are individuals either way. No, the best response is to insist that it might actually be easier in small places to meet people on the more superficial level, as members of other tribes.

If that’s true, then localism takes on more urgency the more tribalistic we get. We ought to see localism not as an accomplice to the tribalism that’s everywhere rising, but as an antidote to it. And it’s not an antidote that depends on the moral quality of the locals. What I’m talking about here is structure, not character. Localism works against tribalism not because people who live in small places are saints who love their enemies (they’re not), but because they’re literally more likely to meet their enemies in contexts in which their enmities are irrelevant. On the local level, it’s just as easy to have your tribal differences, but it’s a lot harder for them to become the most important thing, which is what leads to tribalism.

But we ought to be intentional about it, too, especially if we call ourselves localists, as opposed to just being locals. We didn’t really plan to get involved with two very different kinds of churches, but I think it’s good that we are, and now we try to actively cultivate our relationships in both places. Elisa doesn’t exactly control who comes to Adventure Club (it’s pretty self-selecting), but she certainly wanted it to become what it is, and she does a lot of work to make it work. I didn’t choose my colleagues at work, but I’m glad they exist. (Not getting to choose is an important part of all this; a lot of the tribalism we face now is downstream of having too much control over who we interact with.) Maybe that’s the most important thing: that you actually come to like all this random hobnobbing with “the Other.” It’s just good clean fun to run into people you know, even and especially if they’re on the other side of the Big Issues. When tribal differences don’t degenerate into tribalism, it’s possible to enjoy them.

Real “diversity” isn’t some dramatic idea that you loudly believe in. It’s a simple, everyday pleasure. Seek it out. And realize that you’re more likely to find it when the stage is small.

Image Credit: Norman Rockwell, “Saying Grace” (1951)