Nature, Atavistic Tribalism and Hope

 

As I sat in a demi-fog recovering from “surgery with complications,” I ran newscasts from my recovery bed as my background distraction. It was difficult to focus enough to read, so old-world telecasts were the path of least resistance. I watched indictments of a former US president, factions decry two-separate tiers of justice, descriptions of “weaponization” of systems of justice, a notorious mug shot, bona fide GOP presidential candidates minimizing the reality of climate change – one GOP debate candidate repeating the thoroughly discredited “climate change agenda hoax,” as high pressure heat domes covered much of our nation, inflicting triple-digit continuing temperatures in horrific and unprecedented ways. Tornadoes raged. A hurricane pressed our West Coast. Waters off Florida stepped into a sustain triple digit range… and the heat of Pacific Mexican waters topped that same range… the provocation that became Hurricane Hilary.

Even in modern California, it doesn’t take much to kill. In the analysis of the triple-digit heat wave from Aug. 31 to Sept. 9, 2022, health officials determined that 395 people died. Aside from the fact that most of the world does not have routine access to air conditioning, that extreme heat is a major killer across the globe, that such heat supercharges dry foliage to foment killer wildfires (hello Maui), biologists are also warning that even traditional hot, steamy rain forests have their heat tolerance limits. And those rain forests join forests in general in forming the backbone of land-based photosynthesis, nature’s mechanism for absorbing carbon dioxide and then release life-giving oxygen. Sea-based photosynthesis is equally important. As those sources of photosynthesis disappear, are we ever going to get together to cope with our own potential demise?

This rising global trend to seemingly unstoppable temperature-rising is increasingly becoming an existential threat to life itself. Will future generations live in a world where gasping for breath is routine, where the very plant and animal life that form our food chain begin to wither and die? Will migrating insects and diseases, constantly evolving killers, create a further intolerable reality. Morphing COVID, RSV, killer flus, and even the spread of malaria, now found in mosquitos in Florida, Texas and Maryland? At what point, if ever, are human beings going to put aside their differences in a global effort to survive? Gen Z and younger get it, but why not the rest of us?

There is an atavistic human survivalist trait – the proclivity to circle the wagons under a notion of “us against them” tribalism – which has given rise to the political polarization of our own nation – a populist infection evidenced worldwide – that actually threatens finding and implementing the very solutions we need to survive, for the life on this planet to survive. A vestige of human nature born in caveman days. Writing for the August 26th Wall Street Journal, Aaron Zitner, explains this phenomenon as represented in US politics:

“Ahead of his arrest on Thursday [8/24] in Georgia, Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters about the legal peril he faced from charges of election interference. But the danger wasn’t his alone, he said. ‘In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,’ he told a campaign rally.

“It was the latest example of the Republican former president employing a potent driver of America’s partisan divide: group identity. Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.

“The research helps explain why Trump has solidified his standing as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination despite facing four indictments since April. The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces. His false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, which have triggered much of his legal peril, have been adopted by many of his supporters.

“Democrats are using the tactic, too, if not as forcefully as Trump. The Biden campaign criticized Republicans in Wednesday’s presidential debate as ‘extreme candidates’ who would undermine democracy, and President Biden himself has accused ‘MAGA Republicans’ of trying to destroy our systems of government.

“The split in the electorate has left many Americans fatigued and worried that partisanship is undermining the country’s ability to solve its problems. Calling themselves America’s ‘exhausted majority,’ tens of thousands of people have joined civic groups, with names such as Braver Angels, Listen First and Unify America, and are holding cross-party conversations in search of ways to lower the temperature in political discourse…

“In a landmark 2013 study, Dan Kahan, a Yale University law professor, and colleagues assessed the math skills of about 1,000 adults, a mix of self-described liberals, conservatives and moderates. Then, the researchers gave them a politically inflected math problem to solve, presenting data that pointed to whether cities that had banned concealed handguns experienced a decrease or increase in crime. In half the tests, solving the problem correctly showed that a concealed-carry ban reduced crime rates. In the other half, the correct solution would suggest that crime had risen.

“The result was striking: The more adept the test-takers were at math, the more likely they were to get the correct answer—but only when the right answer matched their political outlook. When the right answer ran contrary to their political stance—that is, when liberals drew a version of the problem suggesting that gun control was ineffective—they tended to give the wrong answer. They were no more likely to solve the problem correctly than were people in the study who were less adept at math.

“To explain why the animosity in American politics is greater today than in the past, some researchers have focused on the nation’s political ‘sorting’—the fact that Americans have shifted their allegiances so that the membership of each party is now far more uniform. In the past, each party had a mix of people who leaned conservative and liberal, rural residents and urbanites, the religiously devout and those less observant.” In short, when people feel threatened for whatever reason, tribalism is the innate response buried deep within our psyches. Facts fade, tribal loyalty rises. But unless humanity begins to unify, hostile factions and nations begin coordinated communication and joint efforts, we face mass extinction with a lot of misery getting these.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I have to remind my readers that nature does not care what we do; she began with nothing and has no genuine stake in our survival.