It’s All the Romans’ Fault
21st July 2017
I found this discussion of individualism and tribalism very interesting.
Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications. But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases. Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else.
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The main alternative to individualism is the tribe. Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group. The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it. You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else. You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. You get the idea.
This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans. It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations. In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis). In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes. The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could. Etc.