T is for Them :: U is for Us

“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They.”

-Rudyard Kipling, “A Friend of the Family”

In the Big Human Equation—that primary equation by which we live (although we most likely refuse to acknowledge its simplicity) —there are only two integers: Us and Them. Or, as Kipling says, We and They.

David Berreby’s fascinating book, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, puts this equation up for pondering: “Why do people live, and die, in nations, races, ethnic groups, religious traditions, and ideologies that mark some as part of Us and others as Them?” Or, as The Onion so poignantly put it, “relations have broken down between U.S. and Them."

It doesn’t escape my notice that “us” always comes first in this equation; saying “them and us” sounds funny, like “women and men” or “Jill and Jack” sound odd, just two examples of language patterns that, like our society, put men first. Us and Them, Them and Us. We put ourselves first. That’s how we work.

“Human kinds are concepts,” Berreby writes, “mental images of the categories we use to get through life. If they did not work at all, people would not use them. So they cannot be fantasies, to be cast off at will. Yet human-kind concepts change all the time…So they aren’t eternal essential facts about people. Like any other thought, categories for people are a hybrid, made partly out of reality and partly by the mind itself.”

“To figure out how human kinds are made, then, the right place to look is between the absolute and the arbitrary…That’s where the mind comes to believe in a human kind like ‘normal people,’ ‘gay people,’ ‘Czech people,’ and so on. To look at that, though, it’s better to start with a more general question: How do we come to believe in categories for anything?”

After all, Aristotle derived the term category from a verb that meant “to accuse.”

And if I am creating the categories into which I am (sometimes unconsciously) dividing people, why not divide the world into hat drivers and non-hat drivers rather than black and white or gay and straight?

As Berreby says, “There are so many ways to sort people. We all do it, all the time. From everyday decisions (whom to invite to dinner) to life choices (whom to marry) to the great turning points of history (whom to war against), we’re guided by an ever-present sense, in any situation, of who belongs with whom, and what that belonging means.”

This tribal sense, he says, is a part of human nature, expressing itself in every aspect of life.

For example, this tribal sense alters our thoughts—if you show older people a negative image of the aged, they act more feeble. Asian women reminded of their Asian heritage do better on a math test than those who are reminded they are women. This tribal sense affects our health—people’s sense of their place in society directly links to measures of stress, depression, and cholesterol levels. This tribal sense can be manipulated for good and for ill—tribal rhetoric has long made people feel that injustice and oppression are perfectly normal.

“We can’t live without our tribal sense,” Berreby says. “It tells us who we are and how we should behave.” And yet, in our modern world, we bristle at the suggestion that we are, deep down, tribal.

Rather than condemn this instinct, as if it were only a source of evil, and rather than celebrate it, as if loyalty and faith were never misused, Berreby suggests a third way: how we can accept and understand our inescapable tribal mind.

Us and Them concludes with a challenge: “The code is in your head, where you make and remake your version, every day….Your human-kind code makes nothing happen, for good or ill, unless you choose to act…In other words, the Us-Them code does not own you; you own it. This power to believe in human kinds, and to love or hate them, is part of your human nature. You could think of it as a set of buttons and levers, built into your mind. You didn’t choose the control panel, but you can decide how to live with it. Push your own buttons and pull your own levers, for instance. Or look away, and let someone else—the politician, the propagandist, the ethnic chief, the family patriarch, the radio loudmouth, the priest, the hack writer—do it for you. Human kinds exist because of human minds. They’re in your head, bound to your fears and hopes, your sweat glands and your gut. But how you choose to live with them is up to you.”

To paraphrase Pogo, “we have met the enemy and them is us.”

[map from The Onion]