Tribalism as anti-politics

Williams opens his essay with a compelling account of the way in which those who feel themselves securely to belong to secular modernity tend to disavow that which is tribal about this belonging. The denial that Western society is but "a culture among others" leads to "the systematic de-legitimising of all habits and practices except those of a self-conscious instrumentalist version of intellectual modernity". An acute point, it nevertheless leaves open the question of why this culture"”the 'liberal West'"” should be the one that disavows its 'tribal' nature while regularly succumbing to bouts of tribalism. All societies, including supposedly tribal ones, presumably create an atmosphere of relatively unselfconscious normative belonging. Other societies can act cruelly and imperialistically. Presumably, all require some kind of self-critical or at least self-correcting mechanism to deal with malign forces that arise within them. This suggests that the kind of modernity in which we find ourselves has a distinctively corrosive effect on our capacity to form functional and sustainable collectives. Applying ourselves to the labour of recognition and identifying conflicts that deny the possibility of recognition are a good way of testing whether we can achieve some kind of social sustainability in these conditions. But we may also be forced to confront, once again, the endemic failures of a society organized according to the logic of commodity exchange and be prepared to look seriously at radically different alternatives.